Obsidian’s J.E. Sawyer on Kickstarter and Crowdfunding-oriented Design

Obsidian Entertainment’s Josh Sawyer, recently project director on Fallout: New Vegas and the ill-fated Project North Carolina, has penned a blog post on the recent trend of Kickstarted-funded projects like Wasteland 2, and the possible effects this type of direct funding from the fans can have on designing a title. As it turns out, he’s pretty positive about the whole situation:

A semi-rhetorical problem I’ve seen folks propose is, “How do you deal with fans when they’re direct investors in the product’s development? Fans don’t know what they want.” Should forum posters define the parameters of a game’s systems? Its story? Should fans be allowed to design a new ending for a game via crowd-sourcing if a bunch of people are mad about it? How do you reconcile fans’ conflicting interests?

This seems like an odd problem to propose, as though now, suddenly, the wants and needs of a diverse paying audience become problematic because they’re kickstarting the game’s development. They’re still the endusers; that hasn’t changed. What’s removed are random staff members — production, marketing, PR — at the publisher shifting the project around in the pitch phase, pre-production, and during development. Even though we’re in the defining moments of this nascent trend, I have to forecast this as purely beneficial for everyone directly involved.

I started my career as a web developer for Black Isle Studios. I was the moderator for a number of high-traffic message boards. Facilitating interaction between the developers and community has always been important to me. You can’t make everyone happy, certainly, but you can help the community understand what you’re doing — and why. When the community gains this understanding, their expectations can be framed in a way that appreciates the process the developers go through. Not everyone will agree with the decisions developers make, but that’s fine — you can’t make everyone happy, whether you’re being funded by a publisher or the endusers. We shouldn’t try to. But we should all try to engage our audience in the spirit of genuine interest, listen to what they have to say, give honest feedback, and formulate an experience that they will enjoy.