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Larian's unfair advantage - Credistick
(credistick.com)
Archived version: https://archive.ph/mNVst
This post was inspired by two things I saw recently:
- Jonny Price of WeFunder, sharing their newly designed raise page, featuring some giants of tech like Substack, Mercury and Levels.
- Xalavier Nelson Jr. of Strange Scaffold, commenting on the seemingly extreme success of Larian Studios, with the upcoming release of Baldur’s Gate, and imporing consumers that it not “raise the standard”.
The connection between these two items is not obvious, but it is interesting.
The idea of starting off being 'crowd funded' to put out your first couple of releases until the big money investors decide you're worth risking anything on is how almost all artists across mediums do things in a capitalist system. As someone from a music background, the parallels between a band scraping together enough money and time to self produce a demo or an EP vs. an indie studio working on a game after work hours is pretty strong.
Honestly, the patron model is probably the best solution that I've seen. The problem is that it's become so tied into patrons receiving weekly updates or rewards that it's hard to turn that viewpoint towards longer term projects that don't necessarily lend themselves to those kinds of short term updates.