Schafers Millions – Do We Still Need Publishers?

This whole Kickstarter situation is an interesting development in the video game industry – it’s highly unlikely to change the way that the industry works as a business.

[MagicAccent]

No, not for niche games where the developer will have to compromise their creative vision in order to please the publisher.

This is the best solution; the consumer is the funder, and there's no middle man to pilfer the profits.

[gamingdroid]

Except:

"There are countless horror stories of publishers being told that, Pete Wanat once retold a personal horror story in an interview for Game Informer which he says happens all the time

A developer acquired funding from a publisher for a project and after very little progress was made on the project, Wanat became suspicious and after investigation he discovered that the developer had left his game idle while it was using the publishers money to fund a secret project they were working on. It wasn’t until Wanat sent out an associate producer to literally oversee day-to-day operations (through a series of surprise visits) that work was completed on Wanats project.

At one of the GDC Burning Mad sessions, Lee Jacobson – vice president of business acquisitions at Midway Games – told the crowd some of his own experiences. One example involved a studio head that kept $300,000 in milestone money for himself and then told his own employees that Midway never sent it. Jacobson also told a story of a visit to a developer who said it had devoted two teams to his project. Jacobson met the first team and then went to lunch. When he came back to meet the second one, he realized that it was made up of a bunch of members from the first team who were pretending to be different people by wearing different clothes."

Hilarity ensures! Well for everyone else, but the funders....

[dinkeldinkse]

Not all of them ruin the games they publish.

[NYC_Gamer]

Indie studios should keep away from publishers and use fan funding instead.

[STK026]

You won't fund the next big MMO or AAA title from a startup studio without publishers. Can fans fund a small game? Yes, absolutely. Could have fans funded GTA4 and it's massive 100 million dollars budget? I highly doubt it.

[kmanmx]

Yes.. indie games can get away with it. But you are never going to fund a game like GTA5 off kickstarter. That game is going to cost atleast $50m + $50m advertising campaign. How are you going to convince all the gamers to give $100m down to a game they havn't even seen ? no body is going to do that in case they screw up.

[Noticeably_FAT]

AAA titles definitely need publishers. Most publishers foot the bill for advertising as well. Just because this guy gets a couple of million dollars doesn't mean everyone can stop looking for publishers.

A couple of million, while a lot to me or you, is pretty insignificant when it comes to most games.