“The first time around, with Wasteland 2, there wasn’t enough data to signify to me [stagnation] was normal,” inXile founder Brian Fargo told me during GDC. “So we thought we were in the middle of a drop-off, but we were wrong. We were like, ‘what happened?’ But we soon found out it’s a very natural progression.
“I read that 87% of Kickstarter projects are small, and I think that in the beginning, someone said only half of the projects were getting financed and only one quarter of those were video games. That’s insane. I mean, if you are out pitching products to publishers, maybe 1% of those are successful. This means that the successful one quarter on Kickstarter being financed brings that figure up to 20-25%. That is a huge statistic.”
“For a while all I heard about was Kickstarter fatigue or that it wasn’t going to happen or whether we should do another one,” said Fargo. “And I thought, if I can provide compelling reasons why and give people more detail – I mean you’ll notice the Torment pitch video was way more detailed than Wasteland 2 , and that’s because the expectations were different than a year ago. Just a year made a difference. But we took more time with the Torment pitch and if you are really striking the right chords and personifying and people understand why they should support a project with their money, I think Kickstarter will continue to do well.”
