”I’m not really sure how long Kickstarter will last,” Avellone admitted, ”What we were worried about with Eternity is that it seemed like a lot of gaming companies were barely making their funding goals. Double Fine and Wasteland II charged pretty strong out of the gate. Shadowrun did pretty well, but then we noticed there’s been a drop-off of how much people were willing to donate.”
He went on to note that his main concern was getting the attention from fans in a crowd of projects. ”I’m worried about Kickstarter exhaustion; it seems like there’s always a new Kickstarter project going up. That was one of the challenges we knew we had to face going into it. We had no idea if we’d make our funding goal at all, just because we’d seen that pattern developing,” he reminisced, ”We’re like, ‘Do we have enough appeal to even stand out in the crowd?’ Fortunately we did.”
Avellone surmised that Kickstarter’s viability would be tested when one of the major projects, such as Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure, finally reaches audiences.
”When the first successful title hits, or even the first unsuccessful title hits, that’ll change Kickstarter in different ways,” he predicted.
”We haven’t really seen the upper levels of how much people are willing to donate. We were joking around about this a few months back. Joss Whedon never went up on Kickstarter and said “Hey, you know what, I started a Kickstarter to buy back the rights to Firefly.” How many millions upon millions of dollars would he get for that?,” Avellone mused.
He then cautioned, ”Then there’s the danger of when the first big failure comes out on Kickstarter, I think people will be even more hesitant about donating. It will be beyond exhaustion level; it will be ‘I’m not sure this process is going to pan out.’”
”I feel like Kickstarter is still in its infancy when it comes to the process; I feel like we’re in the honeymoon phase.”
Project Eternity made its $4M stretch goal a few days ago and is due to be released April 2014.
