How is ‘crowd funding’ affecting the relationship between institutions and audiences at the Publishing, Design, Marketing, and Distribution level? Answer with specific reference to Assassin’s Creed 3 and Double Fine Adventure.
In the computer game industry, there are different ways of creating games on different levels for different audiences, which affects the role that the audience have in the making of the game and success of the game. The main usual way of doing this is through the big gaming institutions that spend huge amounts of money to make a game for a specific audience, whereas smaller scale individual companies, can use a technique called 'crowd funding'. This means an individual small-scale company think of a basic theme for a game, and then request for donations to make up a target fund in order to create it, whilst keeping the target audience and 'backers' or the game donations involved with the creation process. The money from donations is not taken until the target amount is met.
Traditionally in the computer game industry, the publishing layer is the people who put the money into the game. This means they have complete control because of the initial investment, over the game. The audience of the game can only really get involved when the game is released, and don’t have a strong relationship to the institution, or understanding of the full game whilst it is in production. The investment into the game is an extremely large amount, to make sure it completely meets the popular standards they are looking for. An example of this is Assassin’s Creed 3, by Ubisoft, where the genre, graphics, storyline and actions in the game appeal to the audience and this is what brings their sales. This contrasts highly with crowd funded produced games, such as the in-process game Double Fine Adventure. The audience act as a capital for this game, where using something such as ‘Kickstarter’, they can donate money to the institution making the game, to reach the target budget; all money is only transacted though if the goal is reached. The audience can be persuaded to get involved by giving them different rewards depending on how much money they donate. The game creators keep all ownership of the game, and using the involvement from the audience means less publishing costs by an extreme amount compared with the traditional production chain. This means when the game is completed, a lot more profit could be made depending on its success. This shows that creation of a game in this way has a larger conneceted relationship with the audience, completely different than with games like Assassin’s Creed 3. Tim Schafer from Double Fine Adventures shows that although the game had only a $400,000 buget, it already reached this in 8 hours and overall reached $3,336,371, so the public must enjoy the rewards or involvement from being part of the production of a game, and also the game can be adapted with more money to create the most appealing game possible to their target audience.
The two types of game are also very different in the design aspect. In crowd funded games like Double Fine Adventure, the audience take more of an active role, where they can give opinions and suggestions for what they would prefer the game to be like. This particular game’s design is based on older traditional point-and-click games, which could appeal to an audience that prefer the simple games compared to the newer more complicated games that have become popular in the industry. Tim Schaffer (DFA) releases video clips of himself talking about the process of the game production, to keep the audience updated, for which the audience can respond to and put ideas forward from. From this technique, the game would already be popular with the audience before it is even released, so the game creators can be confident of already having a fan-base for it, and with a wider amount of people being able to put ideas forward, for example with 2/5 gamers being women, the game appeals to a wide range of people and backers. However, the big institution of video games of companies such as Ubisoft who make Assassins’s Creed 3 can also be confident of a fan-base and target audience judging by the previous sales of the previous game in the franchise, despite the fact that Assassin’s Creed 2 actually lost money. A weakness of not having crowd funding for this type of game, is that the design of the game is very secretive, with a specific team of people designing the recent popular ideas of graphics and layout of the game, with no involvement of the target audience to give feedback until the buying of the game. This could be a useful technique however, because it builds suspense and excitement until the release date, and also with the element of mystery makes people want to buy it to see what it is about, regardless of whether they are pleased with the outcome or not.
Marketing is another factor that differs between games like Assassin’s Creed 3, and Double Fine Adventures. Assassin’s Creed 3 creators Ubisoft, spent millions of pounds just on the marketing and advertising. This included creating more graphical footage for a theatrical trailer on the internet and television, posters in magazines, shops, on buses and public billboards, internet side-ads and youtube clips about the making of the game. The purpose of this is to convince people to buy the game, introduce new gamers to the franchise, inform people of the release date and create excitement for it's release. Double Fine Productions however, due to it's lack of money compared to institutions like Ubisoft, doesn't advertise their game much. They rely on releasing internet clips and the 3rd party, Kickstarter, to show their game ideas. Then once they have advertised it enough to encourage people to like the game idea and help contribute to the target fund, they rely on the 'word-of-mouth' technique from their backers to tell other people. The main difference to Ubisoft is that most small production crowd funded games like Double Fine Adventure are to be made free for people to play online, so their target isn't to make sales, but just to produce the game, therefore the marketing isn't much of a priority, which is an advantage because to produce the game, the money was donated, but with the Assassin’s Creed Franchise, a lot of money has been lost. The fact that the game is only really marketed to the backers with persuasion of rewards such as free trials and t-shirts from the game, makes the backers feel it is personal to them, and therefore enjoy the relationship with the game compared to the relationship with the bigger popularly marketed games like Assassin’s Creed 3, where the audience know there are a lot more gamers playing the same game. To the people that aren't backers, who play Double Fine Adventure, may also appreciate the fact that it is available free online.
In the normal level of distribution, Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed 3 or will be releasing it on PS3, PSP, Xbox 360 and Wii U. Firstly, this means their target audience must need a games console in order to play it. Secondly, it means they have to go out and buy the game, and in some cases, save up their money before buying the game because of the expense. In contrast, Double Fine Adventures' major advantage to the audience is that it is free to play, and will be available to play in different computer formats, which is more accessible to the audience because 75% of UK households own a computer or laptop or other internet device, whereas 65% own games consoles. This is affecting the large scale institutions because now more and more people use the cheaper option, but also with games like Assassin's Creed 3 becoming more complicated, audiences like to also choose the simple adventure games that are 'easy going ', which could also be because a larger proportion of gamers are statistically showing they are spending more and more time on video games and not allowing their minds to logically think about other things, and with less thinking skills, may result into wanting simpler or more puzzle-based games.
Overall, crowd funded games games have had a big impact into the computer game industry against the bigger institutions. Crowd funded games are becoming more and more popular and creating a stronger relationship with it's audience on each level of production. It is changing the way the audience get involved with a game and is also changing the inspiration for the themes of games, which is different to the way big gaming companies rely on their passive audience to gain profit, through their techniques of popular, modern themes, graphics and challenges within the game, which haven't proved as successful recently with the Assassin's Creed franchise actually losing money, whilst Double Fine Adventures were donated their target in under 8 hours, and extreme amounts more than that before the time limit was up.
