UK devs on Kickstarter: Crowdfunding shouldn't be seen as an 'elaborate pre-order system', says Lightwood Games

With Kickstarter finally giving the green light to projects based in the UK, we decided to get in touch with British-based studios for their take on how the crowdfunding tool may impact the dev scene on these shores.

Next up: Lightwood Games founder and CEO Chris Newman.

Pocket Gamer: Having watched developers in the US utilise Kickstarter, what do you think it'll do for the UK market?

Chris Newman: Those that were really serious about using Kickstarter in the UK already managed to find workarounds to the US-only restriction.  Making it easier is a mixed blessing.

I expect this to open the door to fantastic new projects that would otherwise never see the light of day, but also I expect to see an influx of poorly presented "give me money to buy a MacBook" and "I need to hire a developer, artist, sound guy and buy tomorrow's breakfast" projects.

How valuable is Kickstarter as a marketing tool?

It's a great way to engage with the future users of your product, so if you can create a popular project it's an extremely valuable way to build excitement with a core audience.

But it's certainly not a means to get easy exposure in itself. You still have to drive people to the project in the first place - which is just as difficult as driving people to your app.

In fact, then it's an even harder sell - given you don't actually have a product yet!

Should crowdfunding be a tool primarily used to fund games that can't get publishers, or as some have suggested, is it still a viable option when the developer behind it either has the money to fund the game outright, or has the support of a publisher?

I hate seeing projects along the lines of "we already made something, now we'd like paying for it".

But I don't think crowdfunding should be limited only to those that couldn't find any other sort of funding. It's a viable option which I'm sure many will find preferable to compromising with a publisher.

Is there a risk consumers may suffer from Kickstarter fatigue at some point?

Indeed. I think there's wide misconception that Kickstarter is basically an elaborate pre-order system, which it's definitely not.

The more projects that fail, the more disheartened consumers will become, because they still feel like they're buying something and not contributing to a creative process.

Would you consider using it to fund one of your games?

We've tried a different crowdfunding site in the past, albeit with little success.

I particularly like Kickstarter's enforcement of "raise all the money or get nothing" though, which I think gives the platform a level of integrity that others lack. If we found another opportunity to try crowdfunding, I'd definitely choose Kickstarter.

Thanks to Chris for his time.

If you're a UK dev with a view on Kickstarter's launch, drop us a line at keith.andrew [at] pocketgamer.co.uk.