Why Kickstarter is Best For Old Games and Dead Genres

In a new opinion piece titled “Why Kickstarter is Best For Old Games and Dead Genres”, Kotaku pretty much sums up the reasons spinning through a lot of our heads as we happily throw money in the direction of inXile’s Wasteland 2. Hell, I even put money down on Double Fine Adventure (despite the fact that I really don’t need an adventure game at the moment) because I wanted to show my support for this type of thing:

The mainstream video games industry moves at a breakneck pace. A genre that’s topping the charts one year might be dead in the water only a few short years later. It’s a fate that fans of flight simulators, space combat sims, real-time strategy games and World War Two shooters will only be too well aware of.

Once a booming genre starts to run out of steam, it can be swiftly and suddenly abandoned, publishers sensing that a game which went from five million sales to two million sales is a has-been. Old hat.

What they’re over-looking is that two million people were still buying them. And that there may be millions more out there who were fans of a genre, or franchise, who dropped off along the way as a series progressed and changed in pursuit of relevance and sales.

That can, and obviously is if Schafer and Fargo’s Kickstarter achievements are anything to go by, be a sizeable market. One that’s perfectly suited to the grass-roots kind of development effort the service encourages, that’s able to tap into an established fanbase, one which doesn’t need to be sold on a style of game or the talents of the developers involved.

I bet if Larry Holland, of X-Wing and Tie Fighter fame, opened a Kickstarter project tomorrow for a space combat game, he’d get a similar response. Ditto for Wing Commander’s Chris Roberts, or Ken and Roberta Williams, the driving forces behind many of Sierra’s classic adventure games.

There are still millions of people out there who still want games like that, and there would be tens of thousands of fans willing to kick in money based solely on the chosen genre and talent involved.

And yes, I’d throw a lot of money at a new X-Wing, Wing Commander, or Hero’s Quest, too. Just make it happen, guys.