Bryan Bishop for The Verge:
The crowd-source funding site Kickstarter has been doing remarkably well recently, giving thousands of entrepreneurs the opportunity to bring their projects to life. It also just hit a major milestone: the service has now funded two million-dollar projects, both on the same day. First up was the Elevation Dock for the iPhone, which takes design cues from Apple’s own aluminum unibody products. It hit $1 million in donations sometime around 1:30PM Eastern today. Following it was Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Adventure, which hit its initial goal of $400,000 in approximately eight hours, and crossed the million-dollar mark just a short time ago.
The Elevation Dock is pretty cool, but Double Fine Adventure is particularly remarkable because it hit its funding goal in such a short period of time. It’s taken a lot of people in the game business by surprise – especially Tim Schafer and Double Fine.
Speaking of Double Fine, the company’s classic console platform action game Psychonauts has been ported to the Mac and is available from the Mac App Store for the relatively budget price of $9.99. If you’re looking for something fun to do on your Mac this weekend and you’ve never played it, it’s worth the money.
Very excited about the Double Fine project. Mostly I’m excited about the videos/behind the scenes stuff they’re going to produce as they go along, but I’m also excited about the prospect of another adventure game by the guy who created Day Of The Tentacle 🙂
I haven’t played Dreadnaughts (I haven’t played games for many years, since about the time of DOTT in fact), but I’ll check it out if it looks suitable for my children, and maybe have a sneaky play myself.
This kind of thing, the steady proliferation of crowd funding and social funding should start to make companies think.
The level of customer orientation and focus on their needs is going to become even more important in world, where people with an ambitious idea now have the means to make it into a real product. The field of potential competitors will expand uncontrollably.
Ha, I say Dreadnaughts, but of course I mean Psychonaughts. Dreadnaughts was a game from the C64 days 🙂 Shows how long ago it was I started playing games.