10 INSANE Video Game Risks (That Totally Paid Off)
1. Broken Age Starts The Era Of Crowdfunding
Video games are a business. Your game can be as crazy as you dream it, but it needs to sell, and so producers are likely to select safe bets.
This leaves small teams and untested ideas out in the cold, without the monetary support they need to get off the ground. Enter: crowdfunding.
Double Fine were a respected group amongst their fans but hardly a mainstream studio. Figurehead Tim Schaffer was known for his love of classic adventure games but his attempts to make them had been repeatedly rebuffed by investors. And so he decided to use Kickstarter to make his dream game happen.
Broken Age was really the first big crowdfunding success story in gaming. It smashed it's goal of $400k, coming in at $3m when the campaign ended. The game released to positive reviews, but more than this showed many other studios that this was a possible route if you had something that caught enough attention.
Broken Age really opened the floodgates for indie titles like Shovel Knight, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Yooka-Laylee, just to name a few, to even exist.
Every one of these projects is a risk as those who support your project have certain expectations (at the very least a finished product at some point), and the whole process is fraught with possible issues. Still, when it works, it really shows that the gaming industry is not beholden exclusively to giant corporations.