Former Double Fine COO Justin Bailey has launched a new crwodfunding platform that’s aimed solely at video games, with a board of industry veterans on hand to vet each project before it’s given the go ahead.
It’s called Fig, and the panel of experts includes Tim Schafer, inXile’s Brian Fargo, and Obsidian’s Feargus Urquhart. All of whom have some pretty handy experience when it comes to crowd-funding. The project grew out of a growing sense of community amongst crowd-funded developers.
“In the past … we were just sort of competing with each other for contracts, and now there’s this real general sense of one plus one equals three. We share information, we give comments on other’s videos and campaigns,” Fargo explained to Wired. “Even when projects are point-on competitors to mine, I support them … Their success is not going to mean my failure.”
Since this new platform is designed purely with games in mind, Fargo anticipates some much more ambitious projects. Projects that fans can be reasonably assured have been vetted by trusted names.
“It would not be unreasonable that that starts to double, triple, quadruple what options are available to us,” he said. “It could be that this equity component allows us to do bigger-budget products, to compete visually at a very different level.”
InXile, Double Fine and Obsidian all have upcoming projects planned for Fig, but for now the title to launch the platform is Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds, a physics-based adventure described as ”Majora’s Mask meets Apollo 13”. Which is quite the description. You can find out more about the service here.
