geekosystem

There's been a lot of talk lately about what, exactly, are Kickstarter's guidelines and how they apply to various bigger fish, as it were, coming into the rather small pond of crowdfunding. Lots of claims have been made, and the grumbling is audible across most forms of social media, but what does Kickstarter the company actually think about all this? Hint: They like projects like the ones Zach Braff, Penny Arcade, and Veronica Mars have run.

Look, we're fans of crowdfunding here at Geekosystem. We're not opposed to tossing money at people in order to achieve really, really awesome things that we'd very much like to see come to fruition. The backlash is building, though, as more and more folks attempt to cash in on the craze. Perfect example: Denis Dyack and development studio Precursor Games will be starting up a crowdfunding campaign on May 6th to fund a "spiritual successor" to the acclaimed Eternal Darkness called Shadow of the Eternals.

If there's a better use of crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo than getting the Northlake Public Library a nine-foot-tall statue of The Hulk, we don't know what that use is. The librarians of Northlake have big plans, and those plans involve a giant Hulk statue, and helping people read and create more comic books. They also have one of the most awkward campaign videos we've ever seen.

We love finding interesting Kickstarter campaigns to get behind, but without constantly checking the site it's pretty easy to miss something. To make finding projects to fund easier, Kickstarter has added hashtags, or mot-dièse in French. The popular crowdfunding site already used categories, but they insist hashtags are different. They seem awfully similar, but anything that helps ups find cool new gadgets to throw money at more easily is something we can get behind. #Awesome

We've previously reported on the kind of numbers that Kickstarter has managed to pump into its Games category as of late. In short, this year has seen rather tremendous growth when it comes to crowdfunding for games, and especially video games. With that tremendous growth, of course, comes an increase in the number of companies looking to capitalize on a market they never knew existed. For example, today marks the launch of Gambitious, a crowdfunding platform specifically for video games, that probably really didn't need to exist.

Kickstarter is something like the financial equivalent of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it hooks up folks that have the capability to do fantastic things with people that are happy to help fund said fantastic things. On the other, there are certain people that bite off more than they can chew, especially when it comes to hardware, and therefore fail to deliver on their promises, thus enraging their backers. In an effort to squash this kind of unfortunate outcome, Kickstarter has added a few new rules to indicate that, once again, they are not a store.

The whole point of Kickstarter, and crowdfunding in general, is to avoid the typical pitfalls associated with dealing with publishers and similar lending institutions. For video games, being funded by a publisher often means that said publisher actually owns the rights to your games, among other unfortunate side effects. So, a publisher attempting to manipulate a developer into launching a Kickstarter only to have all the unfortunate side effects attached is just about the worst thing, and exactly what Obsidian Entertainment is claiming happened to them.

Obsidian Entertainment, the company composed of industry veterans behind games like Fallout and Planescape: Torment, has been teasing that something's coming down the pipe for a few days now. Finally, we know: They're bringing the band back together making a brand new isometric fantasy role-playing game for PC called Project Eternity. They need the help of their fans, however, as they're ditching the publisher model and hitting up Kickstarter.

Kickstarter loves games. Specifically, the company loves their Games category. As of August 31st, the Games section of Kickstarter has seen $50,330,275 pledged so far this year to the various goods and services it represents. Considering that the amount pledged for 2011 came to a grand total of $3,615,841, it's a staggering increase. As much as Kickstarter loves games, it looks like games just might love Kickstarter too.