Publishers? We don't need no stinking publishers!

I have been following, with interest, the developments of Tim Schafer’s appeal for money via the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to develop a new adventure game. Part of my interest is down to the fact that I would love to see Schafer and the team at Double Fine make another PC adventure game, but the other thing that spikes my curiosity is what this could mean in the wider context regarding the role of video game publishers.

If Schafer can start making games this way, by directly appealing to the games-buying public for funds, then what is stopping other leading lights of game development from doing the same? Already Chris Avellone at Obsidian has said that he would be interested in developing a game this way. Could we be about to see a deluge of top class studios leave the arms of publishers and rushing to raise funds directly?

Obviously this model is not going to work for everyone. For a start you need to be a pretty high profile developer as they have the required following and can garner the attention necessary to raise the money needed. Also you are unlikely to be able to raise the amounts currently needed to produce big budget games like Halo and Mass Effect. But all those medium-sized games that are supposedly under threat because they can’t compete with the triple A titles and so aren’t worth the risk, through this model suddenly become a lot more viable.

These middle-tier titles only appeal to a small section of the market and are often games that serve genres long forgotten by those of a mainstream ilk. Such titles need in the region of a million pounds to make–and as Tim Schafer and Double Fine have shown; if you can capture the public’s imagination then these kinds of numbers are easily within reach. (Currently Double Fine has raised $1.6m with 29 days still to go.)

Couple this new way of funding with the growth of downloadable services, in particular Steam, and as a studio you have to be thinking about whether you really need to sign-up with a publisher when you want to develop your next idea. Sure there are risks involved if you choose to go down this path, but then the same can be said for any deal you make via the traditional route. At least this way you have total control over the direction of your game and get back a larger portion of the profits.

It has been exciting to see how many developers have taken notice of what Double Fine have achieved and whilst it would be a bit premature to make any far-reaching predictions based on one-off success, part of me wonders whether this move could see a seismic shift in the role of the publisher.