Slightly Mad Studios Launches Slightly Brilliant AAA Game Funding Project

Slightly Mad Studios Launches Slightly Brilliant AAA Game Funding Project

Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.

That narrow, risk averse path to funding has led to stagnation in the AAA space, driving many talented developers into the freewheeling, but less backed world of indie games. These developers need to be creative to fund their projects, utilizing everything from sponsorships to Kickstarter campaigns to massive pre order stunts.

Slightly Mad Studios in the UK has created a new venture called World of Mass Development that aims to combine the best aspects of AAA and independent game funding. It works somewhat like Kickstarter, but is made specifically for AAA game development. is the debut project) and offer gamers the opportunity to donate to them in exchange for perks. The users can sign on and give money to whatever projects they'd like to see completed.

Where WMD differs is how the donor developer relationship continues past theinitial donation. When one donates to a Kickstarter project, their role is pretty much done after giving up the money. But with WMD, depending on how much money one decides to give to a game, they get varying degrees of access to the project until it's complete.

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Lower levels, costing 25 euros and up, give perks like being able to review the minutes of game design meetings and play monthly builds of the game. At the highest levels (which can cost as much as 110,000 euros!) donors can PM game designers, participate in their meetings, play every new build of the game as it's created, and see all the source code.

In addition, the gamers who donated to a game's completion are rewarded with more than just perks they get a split of the back end as well. Developers who use WMD earn just 30 percent of the revenue from their game. The rest goes to the donors who made it happen based on the relative size of each of their contributions.

This might seem unfair to game developers, but it's also the factor that could drive the size of investments up and turn WMD from an indie funding project into the AAA funding project it sees itself as. Investors need to know they're getting some kind of return if they're going to plunk down enough cashto funda AAA game.

This could be a great two way relationship. Gamers with means can see how a game gets made, contribute to one that they believe in, and get paid if they chose wisely. Developers get a big cash boost and get input from their target market during development.

But I can also see where having the wrong entitled 110,000 euro gamer involved in a project could be even more maddening than a publisher. Whatever the risks, gamers and developers need each other to get anything done, and hopefully WMD will help to bring them together and make a dent in the publisher dominated structurecontrolling the AAA space today.

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Card Hunter isn the first indie game made by seasoned industry professionals driven from the world of AAA games by strictures and disappointments of corporate life. But never before have so many distinguished vets gone indie to work on the same exact game!

A teaser.

Jon Chey is the cofounder of Irrational Games and one of the men behind the popular first person shooter BioShock. His new self funded venture Blue Manchu is tackling the new Flash based collectible card game Card Hunter.

Joining him is Dorian Hart from the prestigious, but defunct Looking Glass Studios, indie game designer.

PayPal has, all in all, been great for allowing Web 2.0 economy to grow. For most entities, it the best way to send money between two people on the internet.

Not the case for indie studios.

First, Minecraft maestro Notch had the PayPal account he used to take in his Minecraft money frozen after it racked up too much money too quickly. That could be seen as suspicious given that no other indie game developer had taken in the kind of money Minecraft did. But what happened to two smaller and much less well off indie developers this year has been much more obnoxious. Earlier this year, Project.

Thank you to everyone who entered the photo contest for a chance to win a cool lucid dreaming goggles kit from Mad Science. This month winner was Cerek, who submitted this great camera shutter release project photo:

Cerek made great use of the tiny lighter case, fitting two push buttons and one switch on the outside. The long wire leads make it perfect for taking photos at a distance. Check out the full project here!

Cerek will be receiving one lucid dreaming goggle kit free of charge as a thanks from us here at Mad Science. Stay tuned for more Mad Science Contests coming soon! There are.

Indie developers and their games have enjoyed massive success distributing through Steam, notably Zeboyd Games and Carpe Fulgar. While that bodes well for the future of indies on the platform, Steam has to devote a lot of front page real estate to AAA games and thus can promote small indies as well as a dedicated indie game distribution service could. IndieCity out of the UK seems like it could be that, but today a consortium of three German game companies launched their attempt at beating them to it a distribution site called Little Indie.

The site doesn look like much right now. It has.

Dead Island is known for having the most successful trailer of any game ever. It was a beautiful cinematic experience. But sadly, as details of the game itself emerged, and after it was shown at conventions around the world, doubt began to set in about whether this five year long project would live up to the hype.

If all of the reviews so far are any indication, it has largely failed. I played it at PAX for about 15 minutes, and that was all I could take. The controls are clunky, the graphics off putting, and the collision detection abysmal. Even before the immediate and nearly unprecedented.

Making a video game requires an incredible amount of work. It requires people skilled in many disciplines to work together for thousands of hours merging visual art, computer programming, game design, sound design, and music composition into a fun game. The Indie Stone is a Scottish indie development studio started, like so many others, by industry vets who were tired of corporate restrictions and wanted to make the crazy games they had always imagined.

One positive sign for Project Zomboid is the large YouTube following it has accumulated. Fans are hard at work making machinima of.

Welcome to the Mad Science World! Hold onto your radiation shielded hard hats we going to be posting a ton of great how to articles and videos every week, showcasing the maddest of the mad science experiments on the web. We hope you will be inspired to try these projects at home, but always remember safety first!