How ex-Blizzard devs Frost Giant got players to invest nearly $1m into the studio

gamesindustry.biz:

Plenty of GamesIndustry.biz readers are familiar with the concept of crowdfunding, with well over a decade of Kickstarter campaigns helping to bring many a game to market. Less common, however, is equity crowdfunding.

Via the website StartEngine, Frost Giant Studios launched a campaign earlier this year that enables players to buy shares in the company with the promise of (hopefully) sharing in its long-term success.

The campaign aims to raise between $15,000 and $5 million, and at the time of writing it's approaching the $1 million milestone. We caught up with CEO Tim Morten, who tells us equity crowdfunding is essentially a way to help the studio to self-publish its debut game, free-to-play real-time strategy outing Stormgate.

"We explored various options for publishing Stormgate, and I think maybe from an outside perspective, developing and publishing kind of get lumped together in people’s minds, but they’re very different activities," Morten explains. "Building the game involves a team of developers, engineers, designers, artists, producers. Publishing a game is really a marketing activity. And so, when we built the company, we built the company primarily to develop the product, with the thought that we’ll figure out how we’re going to go to market, self-publish, or with a publisher, later on.

"Now that early access is approaching this summer, it was time for us to make that decision, and we really wanted to be able to make our own decisions with respect to the design and also the launch of the product. And working with a publisher, as much as they bring a lot of marketing expertise and marketing capital, you give up some of that agency. So, really, the StartEngine campaign, the stock offering that we are making, is about enabling Frost Giant to retain its own decision-making and bring Stormgate to market with our vision, instead of giving up some of that power to a publisher."

It's worth making clear that this is not the only source of funding Frost Giant has