Crowd Funding for Games

Crowd funding has without a doubt had a massive impact on media as a whole. Several movies and even television have become realities thanks to sites such as Kickstarter and Fundme. Video games are no exception. Crowd funding has made several video games and video game related content become more than just ideas. Throughout this post I will reference to this article from The Economist.

The leader of crowd funding is currently Kickstarter. Of the top ten projects on this website, five are related to video games. The top of these projects is the OUYA game console. OUYA made 8.6 million dollars with over 63,000 backers. OUYA may not be as large as Xbox or Play Station but in just two years time, but OUYA has put out nearly a thousand games. The community based beginnings have continued as OUYA opens its platform to small time indie developers allowing it to produce so much. Other popular crowd funding based hardware includes the Oculus Rift which acts as an immersion addition to a PC. 

 The Oculus Rift in action.

Kickstarter has also directly led the way for games to be produced by a developer that may not have the startup funds necessary. This concept of the consumers contributing to the development of a game is not something gamers are opposed to. The Economist concludes that a major reason why these games get funded is because the average American gamer is 37 and has plenty of disposable income to pay a little extra for games. Crowd funding also helps the industry itself. Large developers such as Electronic Arts or Activision have seen large profits by sticking to sequels or similar ideas at triple A titles. This has greatly decreased the diversity of games on the market, pushing consumers to crowd funded games for some new content. It is hard for a gamer to find new games to enjoy when half of the ones at Gamestop are military shooters. This is supported by the fact that the three largest games supported on Kickstarter have been from from underrepresented genres. This idea eliminates the need for the middle man, which is the publishers who would typically fund a games development. 

Media convergence is also aided with crowd funding of the web series Video Game High School. Crowd funding has seemingly been a hit in media as a whole. RoosterTeeth, a gaming content based company, made history by setting the record for most money raised for a movie. Only time will tell if these projects will continue to profit. 

Video Games and Movies Relationship

Video games is no doubt a growing and new form of media. This article from the Guardian by Steve Boxer entertains the relationship between movies and video games. Boxer does this through analyzing the various technical and artistic aspects of both genres. 

No one will deny that the video game industry has made very powerful strides in recent years. However, few will conclude that video games have separated themselves from other mediums such as television and movies. For example, The Walking Dead game series from Telltale borrows many aspects from the television show of the same name. It even goes as far as to separate iterations into episodes and seasons. Boxer cites his main example, The Imaginarium. The Imaginarium is the team behind the Xbox One debut exclusive Ryse: Son of Rome.  Imaginarium was partially co-founded by movie motion-capture hero, Andy Serkis. "There was probably a time when people in the games industry wanted to emulate films, but now it's very much the other way around: the technology is driven by video games," quoted Serkis. Motion capturing is when actors use tracking to match visuals in real life to computer generated ones. This method of effects is now shared with both movies and video games. Boxer got a chance to interview the man behind the motion capture of the main character in Ryse. "What we can do now, in real-time, is produce imagery and emotional experiences within a game." I think any gamer will admit to atleast tearing up to the ending of one of their favorite games. This emotional experience is what I think connects video games to the consumer. The first ten minutes of The Last of Us is just as impacting as that of Up. 

Now Imaginarium has been hired for the work on the film adaptation of Animal Farm by George Orwell. This is most likely due to the success and beauty of Ryse. I personally am excited to see this continued relationship of movies and games. What do you think about this. Are games just as much a crucial medium as movies are? And yes, I do plan on talking about video games becoming movies and vice versa. 

Preordering Games

http://bgr.com/2015/01/12/stop-preordering-video-games/
Today's blog will be referring to the Jacob Siegel's article on BGR.com. BGR is an emerging tech and mobile news website. In it, Siegel pleads to consumers to stop pre-ordering video games. He continues to describe the failures of 2014 as a year for video games as an industry.
This past year was full of high expectations. Well into the current generation of video games, most gamers believed that we were going to get some truly revolutionary games along with some that would reinvent their series. The first failure was Watchdogs which was incredibly hyped up with what appeared to be some of the best graphics we had seen. Thus, Ubisoft received a lot of money through pre-orders. With all the high expectations consumers were outraged when the game did not look like the demo from E3. A similar event happened with the latest Bungie title, Destiny. Destiny has promised a vast open-world first person shooter that would revolutionize cooperative gameplay. Gamers saw attributed the success of Halo from Bungie and assumed it would be another hit. That combined with the store bonuses, pre-orders were through the roof. Destiny was a success for profit but not for critics as it provided a limited story and repetitive gameplay. Yet again, gamers were let down by producers refusing to fix their games as they had already made their money. We have seen this pattern yet again with already well established titles. Halo The Master Chief collection and Assassins Creed Unity were widely considered broken games by fans.
Now we find ourselves in a problem as consumers. Do we try to support our developers with confirming our purchase ahead of time? Siegel poses this question to readers. "Why not wait and see if the game actually works before investing in a product that the developer didn't finish? Now I ask you the reader to not pre-order games this year to teach developers that consumers will not purchase a game that comes out before it is finished.