I've talked about Penny Arcade before, and Kickstarter as well.
The former has now offered a foray into the latter. And I can't help wondering if it represents a rare misstep for the broke-the-mold nerd media empire.
I'm really questioning the basic premise of the thing, which is that "People don't like advertising almost as a general rule". I don't like intrusive advertising, and I don't like my media experiences being literally interrupted by advertising. But Penny Arcade generally seemed to do it right - relevant advertising, with a well-publicized standard that they only advertised games they actually thought were worthwhile, and without any of the crummy pop-out rollover tricks or eye-mangling "full site skin" layover ads one tends to get in the video game advertising arena. It has literally never occurred to me to wish for an ad-free Penny Arcade and the feeling persisted, while watching their video, that what the whole thing was really about was the site's primary creators being the ones that thought doing their business without having to sell advertising space would be extra awesome. The economics of the whole thing are clearly generated by how much revenue ads generate and the issue to me seems to be, really, does anybody outside the business care about that? For me (and I sort of know better but it doesn't change how I feel about it any) it just feels like asking for an astonishing amount of money to get rid of a rather inconsequential component of a content experience I'm used to having for free.
The project itself is pushing all sorts of my Kickstarter pet peeve buttons. The rewards in particular are in large part profoundly lame. $15 for a "certificate". For god's sake at least make a sticker or a button or something, I'm supposed to frame this maybe? Add it to my portfolio? 25 bucks gets you an e-book. Seventy five dollars gets you digital downloads of "Tycho's Penny Arcade Singles." Setting aside the "value" of the e-book this boils down to asking for $50 for an ep by an amateur musician. The meaningful rewards start at $125 in the form of an original print (unlimited run). The things that stand out at me about the rewards is that there is a clear imperative not to step on any of the conventional merchandising lines (hence $25 electronic books of 14-year-old comics, or $1,000 for a dozen t-shirts...), and that they are fundamentally designed to minimize creating work in fulfillment. These are pretty deep restrictions.
The high tier rewards are largely of the "you get to have lunch with us" variety and fans being what fans are I suppose they will manage to sell most of them. I have my doubts about the externally handled (due to Kickstarter's $10K pledge limit) super-tier rewards. At the top of the heap $100,000 buys you a single custom "non-commercial" comic. This is just a flat-out bid for wealth patronage and I can't see it happening. Wealthy patrons expect a whole lot more ass-kissing than that. But then what do I know.
What do I know? I guess this remains to be seen. The project has already cleared nearly half its minimum goal in half a day, so maybe people aren't really about the rewards. To me the whole thing seems far too contrived, and calculated... Maybe it's sour grapes, I love the idea of Kickstarter... the lottery with a skill component... but have never conceived of a project idea that didn't seem boil down to "pay me to live in the manner to which I've become accustomed..." with some bullshit "product" nobody is asking for. Maybe I'm just envious that these guys could be famous and beloved enough to pull that one off. Clearly the rewards are not meant to be the deep point of this project. The deep point is reaching the "stretch goals", the promise of new original content on the site. Most of them are "locked" at this point, a videogame paradigm trick that basically means "we're going to do this amazingly cool shit we won't tell you about until you've promised us at least a quarter million dollars."
Penny Arcade's ascent has been characterized by blow-out successes - the ever-increasing heights of their admirable Child's Play charity, the lightning sellouts of their massive PAX conventions. I have a suspicion that this strangely thrown-together-feeling bid to crowd-finance an already-successful business might prove an exception. If I were a betting man I'd pick them to scrape the basic goal on general good will ("scraping" $250,000 of course would be a great day for many people) but fail most of the stretch goals. The real blow-out success stories on Kickstarter have uniformly been about providing a unique product that simply won't exist (or at least not in its fully realized form) without the success of the project, and offer a solid mid-cost reward tier where you get that unique product for a price at least in the appropriate ballpark for what it is. There's a reason for this. For people to show up in full force and put down real money for something that is not a bona fide charity, they expect a real return on their money. Something new, something special, something not everybody will have. Penny Arcade has been quick to repeatedly assert that if it doesn't work, nothing will change - they will go right back to business as usual. What's being offered as an alternative to this seems too ephemeral, and too conceptual, to me.
Now, who wants to pay $45,000 to take me out to lunch?
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