Will crowd-funded gaming take off on Xbox 360?

Two of the biggest pitfalls in the search for truth: generalisation and speculation, are hard to avoid when talking about crowd funding. A crowd is a pretty general thing, obviously, while funding a modern videogame offers few guarantees.

Who are the 'backers' of a project like The Double Fine Adventure, which ignited this whole craze with a whopping $3.3m in donated funds? Did they also put the $3m behind classic RPG sequel Wasteland 2, or is that a different crowd? What do these backers expect, what will they receive, and what happens then?

The answers to those last three might very well be unique to almost every project on Kickstarter, the website that invites creators to appeal for funding directly from their customers long before there's even a product. Or they might not. With three of the most successful pitches - Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns - all promising returns to gaming's endangered genres, there seems more to this than just an exotic form of pre-ordering.

"There is a certain percentage of money from fans based on the animosity they have towards publishers," believes Brian Fargo, head of Wasteland creator inXile Entertainment. "I think it goes beyond just the lack of diversity but into the blatant attempts to commoditise games that have occurred in our industry. People have had enough of day-one DLC and it insults them more when it is on the disc already. Publishers can rationalise that kind of thing all they want but the bottom line is that consumers are annoyed about it."

Developers themselves, he adds, make up a big part of that funding crowd. "This is an attempt to circle the wagons and create a system such that developers create games in a pure fashion," he says. You could speculate all day about the

'impurities' he's alluding to, and chances are you'd be right. People are indeed sick of updates to games released either broken or incomplete; price-gouging initiatives that place the industry's supposed needs over the art of games or the interests of consumers for the sake of maximum profit.

Power to the people

In the face of all this, taking into account the publisher stranglehold over triple-A titles, what better protest vote than to actually fund the alternative? "For anyone interested in the inner workings of the games industry, either professionally or as a fan, this project will be a landmark in exploring the art of development," declares Double Fine's Kickstarter page, referring not just to its adventure game but a companion documentary.

"For people that love great games, this is an opportunity to help bring one to fruition." Elsewhere on the page: "For fans of adventure games, this is a chance to prove that there is still a large demand out there for a unique medium that inspired so many of us."

Wasteland 2's page, meanwhile, says that "not a month goes by when an email doesn't come in asking if we've ever considered doing a sequel. Emails from gamers who remember Wasteland fondly and want, just as badly as we do, to return to that gritty world where burning through clips might be the only thing that keeps you alive; and where running out of ammo will certainly get you killed. The fact that you keep asking for Wasteland 2 told us that there is a demand for it. So we're coming to you for support."

Shadowrun Returns' page offers a quite extraordinary look at the series' 25-year history, reminding us of its layered and textured storytelling, and promising that "for those who have been around since the very early days, we want to make sure that you understand that we understand and that we'd love to see things like this (and more) in the game." It never quite mentions 2007's critical and commercial dud for Xbox 360, yet to do so would sum up perfectly what Returns hopes to avoid.