Thursday, August 09, 2012

Penny Arcade sells short - part 1

So I was a little off in my predictions about Penny Arcade's Kickstarter project to replace their advertisement revenue with donations...  With less than a week to go the project easily cleared its primary goal and looks on track to hit its fourth stretch goal at the $450K point.

It seems unlikely it will get as far as the $525K goal, what an honest person might call a real primary goal, the elimination of advertisement from the front page.  Denigrating someone for raising a mere half million on Kickstarter might reasonably be construed as sour grapes.  But I really believe there's no honest assessment that wouldn't call the project a substantial failure, with the better part of a million dollars' worth of aspirations left on the table and three quarters of the stretch goals unmet (with a full tier not even unlocked).

I've been thinking a lot about how the project stumbled.  I just listened to this older Wired Game|Life Podcast (relevant discussion starts at 3135/4338) that took naysayers to task for calling Penny Arcade out for using Kickstarter when they are an established business.  I don't think critics, dissenters or haters had much to do with it though: this sort of negativity can't really obstruct a project like this - in the proven capacity of negative press to drive attention it might actually help.  No, the real enemy of a fundraising model like Kickstarter is not hate but indifference.  Penny Arcade's Kickstarter failed to capture imagination.  Most coverage of it was pretty much "well those guys are doing this thing".  How did the paradigm-busting little business that could fail so thoroughly to sell this paradigm shift?

Problem #1: A truly poorly-executed initial pitch.

The introductory video to the Kickstarter is literally terrible.  It is intrinsically poorly constructed and it also really showcases the fundamental weaknesses of the pitch.  The first minute or so involves strip creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik ruminating about the early days when they ran the strip on donations.  Holkins opines that this was the "best period" of Penny Arcade history.  His only explanation for what made it best though is that it was "pure".  I'll come back to that.

Suffice to say for now that what I think remarkable here is that the whole substance of the pitch is delivered at this point - no ads, run the site on donations, this will make it as it was before, which was the best time, because it was pure.

What follows is the real downfall of the video.  The pair go to ask PA business mastermind Robert Khoo how much they need to raise to attain the add-free site.  His answer is a million dollars.  This leads into a grim, protracted schtick as the pair tear around the office ranting about the costs their employees incur by eating, owning personal mementos, etc.  This goes on for 4 interminable, painfully un-funny minutes, running the joke into the ground in a manner that would make a Saturday Night Live writer proud.  This is almost 2/3rds of the video's already overlong 6:46 runtime.  During those four minutes literally nothing about the project is communicated.  No argument is made for its value.  It is literally just the one joke, a joke with scarcely any relevance to the narrative of the project (the only messaging with any value, basically that it costs a lot of money to run a business, has problems in itself that I'll get into later).

Through the entire video not one image from the comics is displayed: the pitch literally never shows you what you're supposed to be paying for.  At the end it abruptly switches gears again to the ruminative Holkins and Krahulik.  Holkins sums up the pitch once more: "no ads... a direct relationship with the reader... a return to a glorious golden age."  "We should at least ask them if it's something they want to do," Krahulik suggests.

And here's the last funny thing about the video: they never ask.  They never actually address the potential funder.  Now you can say this is splitting hairs, that the ask is right there in the subsequent text but I think there is a significance to this.

Contrast this to the excellent pitch video for Double Fine Adventure.  It's four minutes long, almost three minutes less than PA's.  It is consistently funny with verbal and visual gags throughout - and yet it is conveying information and persuasion every minute.  In the first minute there is the funny sight gag of Tim Schafer on the drums, followed by a very effective set-up, a funny but affectingly nostalgic appeal to the value of the point-and-click adventure genre, backed by concept art from games like Grim Fandango that simultaneously communicate nostalgia but also Schafer's solid cred as a game developer.  The essence of the pitch is solidified by the quick schtick where a "random gamer" wants to give Schafer money for one of these games.  One gamer's money isn't enough - but what if a whole bunch of gamers could do the same thing?  The why of the Kickstarter thus presented is simple and direct.  By midway Schafer has communicated two solid, unambiguous rewards - the game itself and a documentary that will provide a unique insight into game design.  The potential funder is being invited to be involved in the development process in a real way.  Other sight gags like the sequence where Schafer is irritated by an overly twitchy "point and click" interface trying to pick up his own cup reiterates what the pitch is about.  It's about those great old games you're nostalgic about, warts and all.

Next I'll get into what I think is problematical about what Penny Arcade actually tried to sell with their Kickstarter; in a third chapter I'll discuss issues I saw in the mechanics of their project, and finally I'll talk about problems I see the partially successful project presenting them over the course of the year, and what might follow in years to come.

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