Schafer: “I’m a little scared for publishers”

Double Fine founder thinks Kickstarter a serious threat to traditional model

Chris KempJune 23, 2012

The men behind Double Fine, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, started a wave of interest amongst video game developers in Kickstarter after their own Kickstarter project raised over three million dollars.

The effect was immediate – indie developers have been making constant use of the service since then, to ever-improving result. This has caused many other game developers to attempt to circumvent the process of finding and negotiating with a publisher. This move away from the status quo has caused a shake-up in the industry, and now Schafer and Gilbert feel that crowd-funding could be slowly edging traditional publishers out of the market.

“I’m a little scared, well, for them [publishers], because I see a lot of resistance to it. ‘Well, that’s someone else’s business – we don’t want to be in a race to zero,’ or something like that,” Schafer said.

“I think they’re going to see a lot of migration from developers and fans to more open environments like that, for sure.”

“I think they (publishers) are going have to (change the way they interact with players) because the world is changing and small developers are getting these personal relationships with their fans and people that play the games, and I think the really big publishers need to embrace that or they’re really gonna miss this whole kind of revolution that’s happening right now,” added Gilbert.

Double Fine’s Kickstarter was funded by over 87,000 backers; perhaps publishers should be getting a little nervous.