crowdfund
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Indiegogo 'guaranteed shipping' will ensure refunds if campaigns fail
Indiegogo plans to start offering "guaranteed shipping" on some crowdfunding campaigns through a pilot program starting in 2019. Creators who choose to partake in the pilot will promise to users that their product will be delivered. If they fail to fulfill that promise, supporters will get their money back.
Kickstarter hands Drip crowdfunding platform over to XOXO founders
Drip, Kickstarter's subscriber-based crowdfunding platform designed to compete with Patreon, is shutting down in its current form after launching just one year earlier. It will continue operating for a year before it is transformed into an entirely new project headed up by the team behind XOXO, a festival for independent artists and creators.
Google's Contributor lets you crowdfund sites instead of seeing their ads
Banners, takeovers, pop-unders, interstitials -- there's no understating how important/valuable they are financially, but ads are still basically the bane of the modern internet. That's why it's a little heartening to see Google, a company that made a whopping $15 billion in ad revenue alone last quarter, is giving content creators another way to go. It's called Contributor, and the name really says it all: users can pay certain sites between $1 and $3 per month to be able to surf around without any of Google's ads blasting them in the face.
Make My MMO: July 6 - July 12, 2014
This week in MMO crowdfunding news, Frontier explained its relatively high buy-in prices for Elite: Dangerous alpha and beta testing, while Star Citizen gave fans and onlookers another meaty glimpse behind the development curtain. Finally, Forged Chaos unveiled a seven-minute video showing off the progress on Trials of Ascension's technical demo and combat.
1979 Revolution: Black Friday falls short of fundraising goal
The revolution will not be televised (or appear on your PC), as 1979 Revolution: Black Friday has missed its $395,000 Kickstarter goal. However, this is not the end of the game, but is instead a fresh start. While Kickstarter failed the game, developer Ink Stories has decided to take things private, and has created a new 1979 Revolution website. A scant development for the moment, the site exists so that those who really believe in this project can continue funneling money toward its development. Helpfully this allows Ink Studios to offer backers even more comprehensive rewards for their donations, including a $2,500 slot that earns your face placement on an in-game poster among the heroes of the revolution, and a $7,500 price point which will earn you an associate producer's credit on the game and render your apparently wealthy body as a member of the revolution with his or her own storyline, both in the game's cinematics and its graphic novel. Unfortunately, since its Kickstarter failed, the politically-charged 1979 Revolution has to start its fund-raising efforts from scratch. So far, the site has attracted a little over $12,000 - still quite a ways before it hits $395,000, but at least the development team has proven its devotion to telling the story of the 1979 Iranian revolution. It's unknown how this might affect the game's release date, which was initially planned for Spring 2014.
The Daily Grind: Should government regulate crowdfunding?
Earlier this week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules for regulating public equity crowdfunding that could hit as early as February of next year. If adopted, these rules could affect kickstarters and similar ventures dramatically, according to Forbes. Notably, the regulations would cap crowdfunding investment revenue at $1 million dollars per year, limit individual contributions according to income, eliminate most advertising, and require management through a registered brokerage. The rules are intended to allow crowdfunding ventures to legally sell shares and accept investors, not just rely on donations as we see in the typical MMO kickstarter. But as Forbes argues, the rules won't necessarily have the intended effect as typical project creators can't actually afford to meet the regulations since that's why they were using crowdfunding in the first place. We wonder whether Congress and the SEC will target donation-driven crowdfunding next. It seems to me that at least in MMOland, a lot of studios would struggle, whether they're Star Citizen with 24 million bucks raised to date or Baby's First MMO Startup with two part-time employees and a cat running PR. Then again, kickstarter frauds aren't unheard of, and a lot of people have seen their donations-that-sure-sound-like-investments go down the toilet. What's your take? Should the SEC be regulating crowdfunding ventures the way it would any other investment or fundraising method? [Our original question assumed that Kickstarter donations would be affected. Updates to the SEC proposal have made it clear this is not the case, so we have updated the premise here accordingly, though the question still stands.] Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
