Square Enix Collective adds Kickstarter as crowdfunding option

The past few months have been super-busy as Collective went fully live and we are now posting new projects every week. So far we’ve featured 19 projects from 13 different countries on Collective and it’s awesome to see some of the great ideas coming through submissions and onto the platform, and then handing over to gamers to showing support through votes and comments.

Of course, we know some projects will prove more popular with the community than others, but we hope the feedback the teams get can be constructive – as James Cope from Ruffian Games stated following the unsuccessful Game of Glens pilot campaign: “We'd encourage other developers to give it a go… Being part of the Collective pilot was a really constructive exercise and we learned a lot from it.”

Most recently we’ve been helping Tuque Games in the first crowdfund campaign on Indiegogo, and while the team didn’t hit their $50,000 target, it was a positive process to test channels, gather feedback, and understand how we can support teams more effectively in future – with one of the highlights being a great Let’s Play video from Lewis and Simon on the Yogscast YouTube channel. Even though the project wasn’t funded, the team managed to build a great core community… and I’m sure the story won’t stop there. No doubt the Tuque Games team will share more news on the next steps for World War Machine in the future.

So – onto the main purpose for this update. Until now we’ve partnered exclusively with Indiegogo, but following feedback from the development community, and in-line with our desire to give developers as much freedom and flexibility throughout the process as possible, we’re updating our terms and conditions to add in Kickstarter as an option as well.

Therefore, in the next week or so,  as long as a team is able to run the funding campaign, they’ll be able to choose from either Indiegogo or Kickstarter as a funding platform, according to their preference. To be clear, Kickstarter will only be an option for teams based in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands as the platform doesn’t operate outside of those territories – that’s their rules, not ours!

Looking into the near distance, we expect to make three Square Enix catalogue IP available for developers in a few weeks – if you missed this when we announced Collective, developers will be able to post pitches for games set in the Gex, Fear Effect or Anachronox worlds and we’ll very likely add more to this list from our Western catalogue over time.  We do have slightly different terms for developers who want to pitch ideas around our IP and all of that will be detailed on the Collective website.

That’s it for now, if you have any questions, or would like to speak to any of the teams that are featured on Collective, please email us: [email protected]