Larian’s Swen Vincke on Kickstarter and One Thing Game Journalists Should Do

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke is accustomed to give us very frank, very interesting perspectives through his own blog posts and this one on Kickstarter and “one thing game journalists should do” makes no exception.

While his fears on Kickstarter are not particularly new (which doesn’t make them any less legitimate, just to be clear), his thoughts on digital sales and developer’s own stores seem to be a little more interesting to me, so that’s what I’m going to (extensively) quote:

Continuing with the Wasteland 2 example, what I found extremely interesting and very clever, was how fast Inxile, the team behind Wasteland 2, tried to convert the attention they had on the platform into getting people to use their digital store. That shows real insight into the aftermath of getting the game funded & developed i.e. selling it at the highest possible margin, something tbh I fear a lot of Kickstarter developers are forgetting about, or at least not bothering with for the moment.

I’ve done some entries on generating revenue and improving the margin of a game on my blog already, but there’s no doubt that the best sale for a developer is one that goes directly through his online shop, not only commercially but also strategically.If you’re a developer, and you don’t have your online shop set up, I suggest you drop whatever you’re doing and make sure you have it set up asap.

The problem with these shops is of course getting players aware the shop exists in the first place, so making the Inxile shop more visible as part of the Kickstarter campaign was ingenious.

It ensures access to microcredit post the Kickstarter campaign in the form of preorders, and the more people who start using the shop, the more sales they’ll be able to do through that channel in the future. Inxile actually did quite a lot of other clever things, which lead to them tripling what they asked for, and I’m sure there’s plenty of write-ups on that already. It looked as some of it was scripted, but that’s ok as it was very well done. I hope they’ll make the game really good, because given the hype they managed to create, their success or failure is going to have an impact on other games on Kickstarter.

Now, this entry is getting quite long, but since I’m on the topic of developer digital stores, there’s one last point I’d like to make.

Imho, one of the best things to be done by journalists who say they carry gaming innovation in their hearts, is the advertising of how players can buy a game directly from a developer. It’s a simple thing for them to do, but it can make a very big difference.

To quantify this, here’s a quick approximative breakdown a European digital sale of a 30€ game on a digital platform that takes 30% means the developer gets 17,01€ (56%) of the sales price (I took 19% VAT), as opposed to approximately 23€(76%) that he could make on his own store, taking transaction costs into account.

That’s a 20% difference, which means that for his next game, the developer’s team might be 20% bigger. Now 20% may not sound like a lot, but it is there’s companies that move their entire offices to another country to get a 20% benefit.

I therefore believe that if gaming media people make it a habit to list the address of the developer’s online shop in their previews/reviews., it’ll be good for innovation in games, which in turn will be good for our gaming. (Larian’s shop btw is at www.larianvault.com )

Thanks RPGWatch.