So I was going to write something today about the Google/Motorola thing, because the DOJ and the EU both signed off on that $12.5 billion deal this past Monday and thats a pretty huge deal for anyone paying attention to the patent wars (17,000 patents, if you can wrap your head around that number, plus another 6,800 pending). But then Tim Schafer went and broke the internet, or at least broke Kickstarter, and now thats all I want to talk about.
Quick background if you somehow missed this: Double Fine, the studio behind Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, put up a Kickstarter last week asking for $400,000 to make an old school point-and-click adventure game with Ron Gilbert involved. No publisher, no platform holder, just "give us money and well make the game and film a documentary about it." They hit the $400K goal in eight hours. Eight hours! By the next day they were past a million dollars, which as of Monday made it the fastest project in Kickstarter history to hit that mark, and last I checked it still hasnt slowed down.
Ive backed exactly two Kickstarter projects before this one and both were tiny — a board game reprint and some guys leather wallet thing that I still havent received, incidentally, so my track record with the site is not great. But I threw $15 at Double Fine the day after it launched and I dont regret it even a little. Something about watching a studio just... ask people directly for money to make the thing they want to make, no marketing department, no ten-minute E3 trailer with a guy shouting about next-gen graphics, just Tim Schafer sitting at a desk talking into a webcam. Its a different way of doing this and I think its going to matter more than people realize right now.
Heres my actual hot take though, and I dont think enough people are saying it out loud: this is going to wreck the pitch process for mid-size studios everywhere, in a good way. If you can raise a million dollars from strangers on the internet in 24 hours because you made two games people loved a decade ago, why would you ever sit through a publisher meeting again? I know, I know, not every studio has Tim Schafers name recognition, and not every project is going to pull numbers like this. But the ceiling just moved. Watch how many "spiritual successor" pitches show up on Kickstarter in the next six months. Im calling it now, itll be a lot, and most of them will not deserve the comparison.
(Small tangent: I also think its a little funny that the reward tiers on this thing go all the way up to $10,000 for "executive producer" credit, and apparently people are actually paying that. I would not. I have a mortgage. But good for them I guess.)
Back to the Google thing for a second because I dont want to just drop it entirely — the acquisition getting cleared this fast surprised me a little. I figured the DOJ would sit on this one for months given how much noise there was about Android patents last year, and instead it took what, a couple months total? The official line is that Google gets Motorola for the patent portfolio more than the hardware business, which, sure, probably true, but Ive also got a soft spot for old Motorola phones (the original Droid was the first smartphone I ever actually liked using) and part of me is curious whether Google tries to do anything interesting with the hardware side instead of just letting it sit there as a legal shield. I wouldnt bet on it. Companies rarely buy something for the parts they say they dont care about and then surprise you by caring about them.
Anyway. Two very different stories, same week: one company spending twelve and a half billion dollars to protect itself, and one small team asking regular people for money and getting more than double what they asked for in barely two days. I know which one Im more excited to check on tomorrow morning before Ive even had coffee.
If youre reading this and you havent looked at the Double Fine page yet, go look. Even if you dont back it, watching the number climb in real time is weirdly addictive. I had it open in a tab all weekend.