This one comes to us courtesy of Obsidian, who’ve just successfully funded their Project Eternity Kickstarter, promising to deliver an old school, top-down RPG in the vein of the classic titles that made Black Isle, of whom many employees are alums, so famous.
They revealed, in the comments on the Kickstarter page, that they had been approached in recent months by publishers aiming to fund games through Kickstarter, reaping the benefits of publishing a game without actually putting their money forward.
Feargus Urquhart tells the story himself:
We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter. I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don’t get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits.’
They said, ‘Yes’.
I’m getting chilling echoes of the recording industry’s attitude in this little exchange, which is somewhat surprising considering how comparatively young the gaming industry is.