Kickstarter, the TTRPG Grindhouse
How creators and backers are ground up to feed the Mold
Kickstarter has been making some baffling decisions, which make the future of the crowdfunding platform look grim; this is especially dangerous to roleplaying games, as many publishers and individuals can only get their game made — especially those with physical copies and international distribution through Kickstarter.
However, conversations about the worrisome tendencies of Kickstarter are superficial, accepting many assumptions, wishful-thinking, and claims by Kickstarter at face value. Every awful thing Kickstarter facilitates is received with shock, rather than seen as the consequence of a system of rewards they themselves assigned to the company.
They forget Kickstarter commits and obfuscates the relations of production that make it possible. They are a public utility company that obscures any element of their function, with little to no accountability.
Because this is a platform that so many of us depend for livelihood and art, we do ourselves no favor by failing to engage for the actual reality of Kickstarter. We cannot improve things if we don’t look at the mechanics that make sure the same problems keep being replicated.
Kickstarter is not a storefront
This one seems obvious, right? After all, Kickstarter goes to such lengths to inform you of that; just enough to not be accountable, that is.
Everything else is built on the premise that a good campaign should be as close to a storefront as possible. After all, what can inspire more trust than presenting this as a “pre-order” and “sale”?
You gift people money and they may feel the need to gift you something back. That is what Kickstarter likes to pretend they facilitate.
But that is not how you interact with it as a creator or backer, is it? You know what expectations you have and will be had of you.
Go with your next Kickstarter with this model and tell us how it went; it is the undeniable fact that the most successful projects use Kickstarter as a store.
So this is how we have to make a living in Kickstarter — dance as close as possible to bring a shop, winking at sale discounts and pre-orders and avoid committing fraud. Failure to do so is “running a bad campaign.”
But of course, even a successful one that acts like a store runs into issues.
Because Kickstarter is not a store. It just benefits everyone to pretend so.
Kickstarter is a platform economy
It is frustrating that most people involved in conversations about TTRPG financing cannot recognize platform economies, losing themselves in the hustle lies of “self-employed” and “owners of a publishing house”, since the medium has some of the most predatory platform economies upon which people are forced to depend upon.
More understandable is not recognizing Kickstarter as a platform economy — after all, it is a pretty odd one and they go to great length to disguise this. Unlike Uber and Airbnb, which claim they offer a way to supplement your income while winking and dangling the keys of enterprise and “becoming your own boss-slash-landlord”, Kickstarter makes different promises.
Kickstarter campaigns make ideas into reality. It’s where creators share new visions for creative work with the communities that will come together to fund them.
Funding is almost an afterthought to what Kickstarter sells itself as: a platform for communities to form around ideas and make them real by pooling material resources. It is easy to be detached during the capturing process, as it is not even focused on the creator or backer. This “community” is who the creator is selling their product; the backer is shopping in this “communal marketplace”.
And thus the relationships of production hide in plain sight.
Kickstarter, as a platform economy, is a product of a post-production, post-commodity economy1. This is bad news for you: even if all you want is to run a shop or get the money to make a thing, that will not do. Once captured, you are part of the service, and the rewards mechanics of Kickstarter are going to make sure you keep coming back to it.
When you compare with the predatory three platform economies owned by Hasbro, how odd Itch and OneBookShelf are, and how other platform economies are still quite small, Kickstarter seems almost harmless. At least, it is one that you can make a living on and have some autonomy, right?
However, the nature of relationship it is unchanged and you should remember so: you are the captive audience, they are the owners of the production means that is the platform economy.
Kickstarter displaces precarity
As a “public utility company”, as a platform economy, as a post-commodity post-production “service provider”, Kickstarter does not make much things that “make money” — still, its commissions are good enough to make it one of the few platform economies that actually has a net profit.
But if all they do is management and/or platform calcification labor that ensures the platform continues, where are the over 4 billions of dollars coming through the platform coming from?
Well, externally, of course. That’s the purpose of the platform, but it is worth repeating before going on. Because this also explains where risk is: Kickstarter shoulders no risks. Not yours, for failing to fulfill a funding campaign; not yours, for never getting those gifts and rewards you may have been hoped to receive as a generous gift.
All precarity is thus displaced to backers and creators. This is why Kickstarter gets to do the wildest decisions with zero risk — well, there is an absurd amount of risk, but guess what, you going to shoulder all of it. This changes the relationships of users with Kickstarter and between creators and backers in important ways that we will discuss later.
For now, what is obvious, is that this creates a cascade of precarity: it is to be displaced, and you don’t want to be the one where the wave breaks. There is usually not much to do on the backer end — the only way to have someone else shoulder your end of precarity is to steal their credit card; however, that is possible, and essential for the creator of a successful Kickstarter.
Just like Uber offloads the costs of car maintenance and fuel to their employees, so does Kickstarter to all labor that is required for them to make 1.3 million profit. So, if you want to succeed at a Kickstarter, you need backers to shoulder a certain amount of precarity; if you ask too little, you are put in a more precarious position but if you ask too much you risk he worst positio: not funding!
Of course, you can get over this by cutting corners. If you can get work moved to the global South, if you can squeeze your workers, if you can avoid legal and safety obligations, etc. The reward mechanics of the obfuscation caused by the way Kickstarter operates reward you for going cheap and exploitative — even when the one you exploit to burnout is yourself. Even worse, it rewards underpricing the funding goals and relies on stretch goals for achieving the actually required funding.
Araukana Media is more open than most publishers in discussing how the sausage is made, and their data has been crucial research for this analysis. They revealed how cheap one can get treats and merchandise; the more you can get from these as rewards in lieu of things that require additional work, the better your experience with Kickstarter will be — for you can get more precarity displaced to Global South producers of such treats and to the backers that are willing to invest/donate more money and shoulder more precarity.
Yeah, because that is the thing about backers…
Backers are investors
They are. Kickstarter used to be less coy about admitting it.
Do not believe me? As Kickstarter puts it:
Backers that support a project on Kickstarter get an inside look at the creative process, and help that project come to life.
Oh, but that does not mean that then Kickstarter would be subject to tighter regulations as a financial institution. Of course it would, therefore…
Project creators keep 100% ownership of their work, and Kickstarter cannot be used to offer equity, financial returns, or to solicit loans.
So Kickstarter is financialization tool that is not a financialization tool, where individuals private and collective may get financing from investors that are not investors. Techbros sure love banks that are not banks except they wink at you and point to your wallet.
Backers are investors that abdicate from any benefit from being investors, shoulder all the same risks as any other type of investor, and are denied all the protections of investors.
But you are not a consumer either, remember? Despite any successful project resembling a store, besides all talk of “pre-order”, “saving” and “sales”, Kickstarter is not eCommerce. You have no protection as consumer — as you are not considered one, — as backers of one of the most successful Kickstarter projects found out at the time of this article, where the reward for their investment was an e-mail exchange with Amazon Prime customer services.
Examine your own relationship with Kickstarter keeping in mind that you are an investor. Would you have asked deeper questions about who is being paid for what if you were an investor? Would you be satisfied with the priorities of the project? Would you be in a position to shoulder this risk? Are you okay with the possibility of not getting anything? Are you satisfied with the labor conditions of the project? You, who abdicated of profit-sharing, are okay with profit-motive trumping every other aspect of the project?
This examination becomes more important when you get to this question: what other financialization this project has? Because if you are investors, and there are another investors, are you lesser because you are investing through KS? Because if you are are investors, and there are other investors, are you lesser because you are investing through KS? What are the other investors getting? Why are you shouldering a proportional amount of this risk, if they actually collect dividends? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Amazon and Titmouse will get a trial Amazon Prime account for their investments; just as I don’t think Viacom is investing to get a piece of cloth stamped with a screenshot from the opening of Avatar The Last Airbender.
If this is not something you ask yourself, perhaps you should. After all, this is what Kickstarter claims is all that you should expect to get.
Creators are employees
See that dreadful hellish thing? Does it haunt your nightmares?
Because that’s what Kickstarter is selling; that is the product.
Access to you. At any time. Unquestioned. “Full insight into the creative process”, remember?
One would think Kickstarter takes its pound of flesh, its 5% from a project and each of you go each other way. This is the relationship Kickstarter and (lack of) technical support to downplay how much you work for them. Part of it is obvious: who would go to Kickstarter if not for creators? How would Kickstart support its operations and make a profit without creators? How the flux of Superbackers and front-page projects is maintained without creators? But then again, it is also the additional work beyond the creative work required to accomplish the project? How much your work changes because of the demands of the platform? How have you been burned-out by that infernal bell?
Being captured by a platform economy — especially one such as Kickstarter — is a psychopolitical2 nightmare. You are the product; you are forever employed by Kickstarter on undetermined terms — no matter how long the Kickstarter has. You are expected to discipline yourself, mind and soul; it is up to you how you going to exploit yourself (or pass the precarity ball) outside of the platform. As long as you deliver yourself when summoned, as long as you keep answering the call. This is sold to you as autonomy, independence, even as you grow more and more dependent on Kickstarter — the violence of positivity being used to capture you.
Once you are captured by Kickstarter and become their employee-not-employee, it becomes very difficult to leave. Not the hard, obvious chains, of course. That is not the way these technologies of power operate; by the reward-incentives presented to you, so that you manage yourself to not leaving. After all, a successful Kickstarter requires one to front-load plenty of work to get trust in Kickstarter; you can take the money and leave Kickstarter, but you already did that work, so why not make a second Kickstarter? Why not join the team of these other Kickstarters? Superbacker X is already buying access to you 24/7 from Kickstarter X and Kickstarter Y, what risk is there in also getting them to access you with Kickstarter Z? Maybe I can do a stretch goal here, and another there…
This is why it is so hard for people that have relied on Kickstarter for funding before have such a difficult time leaving it; after all, if they required it in the first place, they were already in a precarious position. And because of how much displaced precarity has been placed upon them, they are unlikely to be doing much better. And as Kickstarter becomes a bigger share of their income, the more this dependency grows. Besides, Kickstarter is their employer; telling someone to just leave Kickstarter without offering a way out of capture is like uncritically telling someone to just quit their job. Even for no other reason, because psychopolitical grip upon creators and the reward-incentives, support must be provided to escape the platform economy.
They sure do everything to keep you around.
Continued reliance on Kickstarter draws upon emotional capitalism, as it requires a constant politicization of self as it is bared; be there long enough and there is less and less separation of backer access to the project to backer access to creator. Of course, just like everything else can be precarialized, companies and bigger projects have dedicated project managers — who shoulder the burnout and psychopolitical harm for their bosses. The danger — and important for Kickstarter and hosted projects — of these jobs is understated, deeply undervalued with this constant cover-up of relationships. The fact that these require femme-associated skills, that these tend to be often times the only femme members of project teams cannot be discarded as a reason why the cost of this cruel system on backer-facing creator teams as acceptable. This is yet another unsustainable system propped up by and allowed to chug about by the work of women and at their expense.
It is not like KS does any better for the acknowledged employees, the “real” workers of Kickstarter. As covered by the excellent, which I recommend a listen, Kickstarter Union Oral History, Kickstarter has, for all their claims about being a Benefit Corporation and their progressive agenda/alignment, been an awful employer, promoted atrocious projects and fought tooth and nail against the unionization efforts. Even if Kickstarter has finally recognized the Union, many of their most energetic organizers have left the company on definitely-unrelated issues; it is clear the mobilization and collective potential of the Union has suffered from the proactive struggle, with no better proof than how management has been keeping them in the dark about the company’s future.
If this is how they treat Kickstarter United, what do you think they think of you?
Kickstarter has no incentives to chance or police itself
One cannot expect Kickstarter to improve itself.
There are plenty of examples where Kickstarter openly flaunted their own rules; holding the company accountable was one of the radicalizing factors leading up to unionization efforts. While I’m not accusing Kickstarter of doing so, all I want is to point out that Kickstarter asks to nobody except themselves, and it polices itself, and it has all-reward incentives to look the other way.
Kickstarter benefits from having people spend as much time as possible on the platform, for as much money as possible being injected into the platform. They also get the lion’s share of their profits from projects funding. So if people are running more projects, if more projects are being financed, Kickstarter makes more money. However, if Kickstarter scrutinizes itself, if this scrutiny ends up with fewer projects being offered and less funding, this means they make less money at the cost of spending labor and money on scrutiny.
There is a reward-incentive to being lax.
There are no external regulators.
They do things to creators no creator asked for.
They do things to backers no backers asked for.
Nobody asked for being in the blockchain.
Kickstarter United tries. Other than that, only investors have any pull on what Kickstarter does — or chooses to not do.
Kickstarter changes how games are made
Now, Kickstarter is what allows certain games to even exist and be distributed internationally. However, after one acknowledges that, one cannot deny that Kickstarter influences how games are made.
Some of it is obvious: one cannot expect the change in relationships and the damn stress Kickstarter imposes upon creative processes and the result. The exhaustion of updates requests has to build up and has to affect creatives; that is a given. How many creatives suffer burnout from Kickstarter? Every year we lose a few, ground into dust by the system and forced to abandon the art form forever.
Backers have direct and indirect input over the project and how it goes; the smaller your team, the bigger the impact of this “coercive” presence. This is not a bug, but alas, what Kickstarter sells backers and what they expect. These psychopolitical forces and exposure have an homogenising effect upon art — fighting against that is going to demand further stress, effort and precarity. It is not your impression that some projects seem to blur together; it is the effect of following certain reward-incentives.
Because Kickstarter did not emerge from the Void yesterday, this influence starts even before a project is announced. Planning a project page is a lot of work, and change what how the project is conceived: the art required for a “proper” project page is not always the same for your intended project and to reduce precarity these should overlap as much as possible; art and writing that make selling a project easier to investors get prioritized. Systems that are already established and popular require less risk, so you may pick the dragon game or the latest indie trend that got successful Kickstarters funded, etc. That is to say, there are no exceptions or these are even trends much less universal principles; these are just the reward-incentives given and the effects upon games if one follows them. If you defy these incentives, you shoulder further precarity — and this has been and will be weaponized against minorities. Not to mention that entire cottage industries of scammers have developed around nudging games to do better at Kickstarter.
Creator precarity can be attenuated (beyond the usual ways precarity can be displaced we talked before) in two strategies: going bigger with projects or trying to get as many Kickstarters as possible going and shoulder risk with volume — and since there are limited work-arounds Kickstarter’s rules, that is limited to trying to be a stretch goal in as many projects as possible.
Going big means asking aiming for overfunding, so that you have less precarity per Kickstarter. But this is not coming from anywhere within Kickstarter — it is coming from backers. And for that, the backers need to feel they are getting “their money’s worth”, otherwise they will not be coaxed into investing.
So the reward incentive is to make a book — either you have profit-motive or a social motive like getting everyone properly paid for once — as big and “feeling premium” as much as you can. Keep bloating it with special editions and features, because this scales much better compared to the precarity you shoulder.
It is pretty obvious that a book that could have been a zine being a 300 pages tome will have changes to what the game is. In an art medium where a lot of design is usually “less is more”, this upscaling has to change the art, relations and productions and associated experiences. When a lot of the upscaling is also rewarded by additional stretch goals (the other strategy and people following it), not everything is going to mesh the same way as originally designed. The full effect of this cannot be predicted in the early stages of planning, but it cannot be denied that it changes the art. Games are complicated tools and art pieces, where it is hard to have everything come together in a systematic manner under the best of circumstances.
And it is also another precarity-release valve, specially if you can get away with upscaling with poor compensation for art, writing, design, editing, etc. Alas, the reward-incentive to do that is there and the precarity benefits would be two-fold. Get the most by paying the less and you don’t risk your neck (for now).
Kickstarter holds many of us captives — as backers but specially as creators.
And this shapes our art — and what it costs to get it out in the world. Resisting it means shouldering more precarity yourself or being put in the corner and shoved around. It is impressive we have got such amazing art out of Kickstarter given these atrocious conditions, and we should celebrate all the people that put the extra effort to make this possible.
Conclusion?
That was a depressing thing to write and cannot be any better to read. Yet, it was important to go through the relationships upon which Kickstarter, as a system, is based: people talk about things like Kickstarter going with blockchain, fighting unionization, or shoving Zinequest around tarnishes in an otherwise impeccable record; that the platform is essentially good.
No.
Kickstarter is a platform economy that relies on displacement precarity, obscuring production relations, and worker exploitation and abuse. A place of workers-that-are-not-workers, investors-that-are-not-investors and consumers-that-are-not-consumers. In a world of rot, Kickstarter is mold.
I am not one given to prescriptions; I wanted to share a reflection about the ways Kickstarter operates as a system to which many people we care and the art we love are subjected to. Because it is extremely bleak to end here, I will share some of the ways I am trying to shift my attitude towards Kickstarter:
Support Kickstarter United. Change will not come from above; Kickstarter will only be an actual common-good platform once it is worker-controlled. Every small gain in the way there is a dent in this awful system.
Recognition of the worker status of creators. And allow them to join Kickstarter United.
Denounce predatory Kickstarter practices. Keeping in eye to the relationships, call on bullshit
Think as an investor. I will pick Kickstarters that I believe bring good to the world, that are worker-owned projects, do not displace precarity, etc rather than what would be a delightful treat as a consumer.
Transparency of relationship and production in projects as creator. I will make clear where the lines are drawn in terms of what Kickstarter is selling about me, the arrows of precarity and what you are actually backing.
Support transition efforts out of platform economies. Kickstarter may tank itself sooner than later, and as always, it will be creators and other employees that shoulder all precarity of risk for that. Support creators trying to make the switch off Kickstarter.
Attack the system. Not individual creators or backers; pointless at best, harmful at worst.
Learn about the relationships and reward-incentives and apply a critical eye outside of Kickstarter. Think about the problems you have with Kickstarter; see which material conditions and relationship of production that caused that. Look at the proposed alternatives with this experience and resist capture by other platform economies.
I will probably not do even a third of those.
But like hell I’m gonna pretend Kickstarter is good bean that ruined their reputation by joining in burning the planet.
A stage of capitalist decay where in lieu of profit from the trading of commodities, the economy is focused in making everything a service — including products produced in a marginal economy — and collecting rents on access to said services.
Technologies of control that use emotional capitalism, toxic positivity, self-management, externalization and politicization of the self as a “smart” form of power. You can identify psychopolitical elements by following the smell of burnout around you.