Are AAA Game Developers Hurting Crowdfunding?

[dropcap size=big]P[/dropcap]illars of Eternity, Shantae and Might No. 9 are some of the biggest and most successful games to come out of Kickstarter but it makes me wonder why they were brought to it in the first place. Pillars of Eternity is definitely hitting a niche market so the idea for funding through Kickstarter makes sense but such a big studio has to be able to find some publishers right? Wayforward just released a Shantae game so they shouldn’t have much of a problem. Even with games like Divinity: Original Sin, the developers received funds for their game but required more to make their game as complete and fleshed out as possible.

Pillars of Eternity was nothing more of an idea with daily to weekly concept art updates. Double Fine has also taken advantage of Kickstarter by telling people that they would make an Adventure game and that is really about it. There are so many projects on these crowdfunding sites that do the same thing and get nothing. There are also so many projects that have fully fleshed out ideas, game trailers and demos that don’t get funded either. It almost unfair and it feels as if these developers are taking advantage of their audience and guilt tripping them into funding a cause that doesn’t need immediate funding.

These big developers put a very high standard on what can and cannot be funded which might actually be a good thing. It makes developers work harder on their ideas, but they need to be much farther into the dev process to even get a second glance. Hopefully, the quality of these indie devs will force AAA studios to work harder to present their ideas before they post things all willy nilly. Double Fine’s Broken Age Part 1 is great and Pillars of Eternity is looking to be great as well. It just pains me to see developers use their credibility in this way.

So, is AAA studios hurting crowdfunding? The argument is still up in the air but overall I say no. Yeah, it sucks to see developers make projects stating they are working on making a game with genre X but it gives crowdfunding sites a huge boost to their credibility and when a indie dev makes something great it makes it that much better. I’ve put money into Pillars of Eternity and Mighty No. 9 but I have also put money into A Hat in Time and ANNE. There is room for both as long as developers continue to make great games.