I wonder if this campaign will raise any further press regarding PC gaming, crowd funding,... that might even reach decision makers from large companies (no matter how SC will work out). IMO it is a pretty big statement from 'the gamers' as to what they want.
Well, let's put things into context here. Chris Roberts raised an incredible amount of money from the public - but it's still small change compared to what is actually spent on AAA games these days. Star Citizen has huge implications, but not for large companies - rather, it's expected to make a lot of waves amongst mid-sized companies, the ones that have been suffering badly for the last couple of years. There has been a lot of trouble on the publishing side in recent years, and the result is that money in that "mid-budget" range (between half a million and ten million dollars) has been increasingly difficult to obtain.
The industry has been watching Kickstarter very carefully ever since Tim Schafer raised three million to make a classic adventure game, but there has been a lot of scepticism, people suspecting that this won't work for most companies, that the Kickstarter bubble will soon burst, and that ultimately, you can't raise
that much money. After all, three million dollars only seems like a lot of money - for a development team, it's not huge (think about it - $3 million in 2012 dollars is just over $500,000 in 1990 dollars - that's the price of making Wing Commander I, with a team of about two dozen people).
What Chris Roberts has achieved, I think, is the following:
1. Proven that there's no such thing as a "Kickstarter bubble". Yes, there may in the future be some big failures on Kickstarter, which will make people more wary of unknown projects. But if Chris Roberts is able to raise four million without even touching Kickstarter (plus another two there), then clearly crowdfunding is something bigger than just a temporary wave of enthusiasm about a specific service.
2. Proven that you can in fact raise a lot more money than anyone previously thought possible. Remember, Tim Schafer got three million... having asked for $300,000. Now Chris Roberts had the gall to ask for two million... and still ended up getting three times as much. So now, we're amazed by the six million raised - but just wait until someone else raises twelve million to make a game in a genre that people actually care about
.
3. Shown the way to do it. Engage with the fans directly, circumvent Kickstarter and other similar services, and make your own rules. I expect in the future there will be a lot of experimentation with this. In particular, I am dead certain that soon some companies will actually try offering opportunities for actual investment - i.e., offering a small percentage of the revenues in exchange for money. Nobody will want to be the first to try this, because everyone obviously prefers to raise money without giving up revenue - but someone will try it, will achieve big success with it, and others will follow.
It's going to be interesting to watch, because there's going to be some very spectacular successes ahead... and failures, too. Most people, I suspect, are only capable of supporting one major product at a time. If you've contributed several hundred dollars or more to Star Citizen, you're not going to contribute that kind of money to another project for months, if not years. So, this market will be as easy to glut as the MMO market. To be honest, I'm kinda worried now, that mid-budget projects like this will soon come to dominate the crowdfunding scene, and the poor indies will once again find it hard to raise any sensible amount of cash.
angerous, X:Rebirth and Infinity are released (yesterday Infinity announced that they are going to do a Kickstarter in early 2013, what a coincidence 