“Shut up and take my money.” Well I didn’t say that. That’s exactly what a gaming fan (Eurogamer reader Arcam http://kck.st/zHkxwF ) told a game developer who is turning out to be the next big success on Kickstarter after Double Fine’s $3.3 million haul. The best part is, in the campaign video, Brian Fargo, the man behind the Wasteland 2 crowdfunding campaign, told the audience, how miserably he failed to convince the gaming investors/publishers to fund his project. In essence, confessing the audience that no traditional gaming industry insider of present time would touch his project with a ten foot pole. Conventional wisdom told me that his confession would deter me from putting my 2 cents in his project turned down by the established video game sponsors. Yet, the crowd went gung-ho over his Wasteland 2 idea. Within just 48 hours of the campaign, they gave him more than he wanted. And, the money keeps pouring in as we speak.
So what is the moral of the story? As much as it is scientifically established that much of human behavior is predictable, one would expect the crowd to be a cumulative aggregate of that prediction. Wrong!! The crowd psyche is unpredictable. As it stands today, crowd economy is heading northward; just impossible to predict the extent of its economic impact on entrepreneurship with any certainty. At least, it’s beyond me.
So what is the moral of the story? As much as it is scientifically established that much of human behavior is predictable, one would expect the crowd to be a cumulative aggregate of that prediction. Wrong!! The crowd psyche is unpredictable. As it stands today, crowd economy is heading northward; just impossible to predict the extent of its economic impact on entrepreneurship with any certainty. At least, it’s beyond me.
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