I loved everything about that project. The logo. The people behind it. The Kickstarter campaign being wildly successful. The mission. Everything looked awesome. I backed it, tried to help and participate, never got an email back.
After fees and failed pledges, $306,915 remained. More than half of this was spent on the initial renovation and leasing of the warehouse.
I still fail to understand how, say, $175K were not enough to renovate and lease a small warehouse. Game developers pretty much only need outlets and some relative quiet. I feel like organizers –as it happens so often with crowdfunding campaigns- went too hard and thought that they could afford architects and such. Same with rewards: pushing for original games made just for the backers sounded a bit crazy to me (you know it takes forever to make a good game, right?). Overreaching is so common in crowdfunding and yet, campaigns always fall into that trap.
While LA/GS is gone, its goal remains valid and we encourage others to pursue this dream: To explore and expand the potential of videogames as a creative medium.
We are, game developers of all kinds, already doing that: there are tons of wacky and weird games out there! It’s always been the case since the beginning of computer games. That’s not the dream. What we need is to secure some ways to sustain our creative medium that is so demanding. We need to sustain its craftsmen and women. Its workforce there, I said it. We need to sustain common foundations to build better and more under control than what we’ve done in the past. Unity and Unreal are just a couple stones. We need so much more. We need to get away from the Me Too paradigm that is making computer game culture a joke. So much has been written by stellar minds on the subject of game development and game design and we’re not leveraging anything! It’s quite unreal.
It doesn’t take fancy offices to practice production and make solid games. Nor should it need over a quarter million dollars to open a space and allow it to become a sustainable gamedev environment.
There will be other LA Game Spaces.