inXile’s Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera was a wild success, raising well over $4 million. Despite this record level for a game on Kickstarter, Brian Fargo doesn’t think that publishers would have bit on his game in retrospect.
“You have to remember that, I’m going to make up some numbers here, but we’ve got 60,000 people who’ve backed the projects,” said Fargo. “Let’s say I go out digitally and, we could do better, but let’s say I sell another 100,000. So that’s 160,000 pieces to a publisher That’s a waste of their time. Activision could probably sit down in an afternoon and figure out how to sell 160,000 more copies of Call of Duty in some region and have it done in a week, done and dusted. So the numbers they’re looking for means that our numbers just aren’t very exciting for them.”
“For us though, it couldn’t be better,” he added. “Our success is their failure, in terms of numbers. Gosh, if we deliver on these games, and we will deliver on these games, and we just do these kinds of units, nothing crazy happens and it allows me and my guys to make roleplaying games for another decade. And that’s fantastic, and all within numbers that just aren’t exciting to publishers.”
For Fargo, he’ll look to crowdfunding options like Kickstarter going forward rather than traditional publishers. “I’d like to be able to continue to control my destiny, I’m used to doing that,” he said. “I’m not used to working for publisher and being at their whim, so I’m very comfortable doing this and delivering a finished product. If the landscape were to change and there was no Kickstarter, I’d still continue along this route of self-financing or raising money or whatever to continue doing what we’re doing.”
When asked about the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter, Fargo revealed that it played an important role in the timing of the Torment Kickstarter. “We had a really important milestone in February when we took a snapshot of us playing the actual game,” he described. “We didn’t create a demo for a trade show, we waited until it was organically ready and correct. We captured about 15 minutes of gameplay and backers could see some of the interface, they could read the text and get a sense of the style, the graphics, the combat systems the nuances, the use of skills and so on. People loved it, they absolutely loved it. In fact, I wouldn’t have launched the Torment Kickstarter if they didn’t love that, but they did.”
“So that was a good sign for us because from this point on I just need to do more of that. There are no more technological hurdles left, it’s just a matter of implementing all of the grand depth of design that we have,” he added. “And so everything’s coming along very nicely. Our next internal milestone is that, by the end of April, all the levels will be in and playable in a rough blockout form, so we can have people come in and play the game and start iterating and iterating and iterating. As we march towards summer we’ll start sneaking out areas for people to play to prepare ourselves for a full beta test. It’s coming along very nicely.”
Source: PCGamesN.com
