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At the time of writing, Peter Molyneux's Project Godus, a new god game, has raised £247,044 towards its £450,000 goal on Kickstarter. There are 10 days left to go. Meanwhile, over in Cambridge, Peter's buddy David Braben has raised £699,729 out of £1.25m to make Elite: Dangerous with 24 days left to go. Neither project is guaranteed to be fully funded, but the point is that these grand old men of the British games industry have attracted almost £1 million of support from random people on the internet by promising to return to their roots.Not that they are blazing a trail, exactly, because the crusty old Americans were at it with this stuff before Molyneux had even handed in his notice at Microsoft. Tim Schafer famously raised over $3m after asking for $400k to make a graphical adventure, and then Brian Fargo wanted $900k to make Wasteland 2 and ended up with $2.9m. They are only the most famous examples. In fact, they're only two of the most famous examples. Basically everyone's at it.
None of this has sat well with me. Maybe these rich old men can't afford to fund the development of their dream projects out of their own pocket - I don't know - but if they can't convince publishers and actual investors to fund them then I think they have to look at themselves and ask why, not look to us. Not to pick on Peter Molyneux, but I can think of plenty of reasons why no publisher or investor would bankroll one of his games without any kind of creative control, which is what £250k's worth of your money is currently promising to do.
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