For us, the Kickstarter campaign was a lot of work, with late nights and updates trying to get to our base amount kicking and scratching.”“The proof is in the pudding,” he continues. When you’ve got a twitter base of millions of people, it’s a nice way to raise some money to do a side project. It is interesting to see the whole celebrity effect as well, not just in games, there’re people doing movies on Kickstarter as well. You get a very short chance to reach a microcosm of the entire world, and you get to see how viral you can go in that time. I think so much of it has to do with the viral nature of the world we live in. “It’s amazing to watch how that whole process works, and a lot of it is voodoo to me. For Miller and the team, this wasn’t a glorified proof-of-concept or an easy cash-in on Myst’s good name, but a make-or-break deal. “It was literally one line, and I thought, “This is like magic”.Ĭyan are another name on the long list of established industry veterans finding funding on Kickstarter. That’s not trivial, and if people are willing to do that, you can rest assured that they’re serious about what they’re saying.” And there’s no better way to poll people and get a serious response than making them actually put some money down.
We thought people would be interested in a game that gave a similar experience to what Myst did, but you have no way of knowing, there’s no magic polling device we can put out there. We looked at it as a way to get in touch with a base of fans and an extended base of fans, in a way that I don’t know how else we could’ve gotten to them. Like all things it becomes more and more sophisticated as part of its evolution. I don’t know what’ll happen with Kickstarter in the future.
“And I think it goes hand-in-hand with the whole trend towards indie and more personal experiences with people more involved at a basic level. “It’s an amazing platform,” Miller explains. Cyan successfully took Obduction to Kickstarter, confident that there was still a market for their distinctive brand of adventure – over 22,000 agreed, to the tune of $1.3 million.