Laos and Nicaragua.

What do these two small nations have in common? Is it pirates? Is it that I had to check the spelling of them twice just to write the opening line to this article?

Or is it the fact that they all have a military budget smaller than what has been raised on Kickstarter for a single game?

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few months, and avoiding all gaming news (in which case, E3 was pretty cool, man!), you probably know that Star Citizen has become a monster that cannot be stopped. It is $47 million into its turn on the crowdfunding site and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. It has gained so much momentum that it is currently raising over a $1 million a month from eager gamers who see it as the greatest, most fabled game that has ever been in development. The entire situation has become something of a spectacle to watch, as the developers add more and more features to the game as their budget swells larger and larger and as fans become more and more demanding of the final product.

This isn’t the first super successful crowdfunded game to hit the news recently. Not long ago, Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions set the record for crowdfunded games with their adventure game, Broken Age, which reached its $400,000 goal just hours after the campaign launched and ended up raising more than $3.3 million by the time funding was closed, less than two months later. However, this influx of money didn’t do much to quiet the frustration of those fans who paid to see the game brought to life, as production was delayed repeatedly to accommodate the now huge amounts of money that the small company had access to.

Crowdfunding sites, of which Kickstarter is the largest and best known, were once heralded as the destroyer of the publisher. After all, if a developer can just go right to the fans for the capital needed to make their game happen, they’ll be free to make whatever artistic vision they have imagined without interference. Imagine a world without unrealistic deadlines. Without calls to censor certain aspects of the story. Without Electronic Arts doing all the things they did to be the only company to be named “Worst Company in America” two years in a row.

Its a beautiful idea, right? Unfortunately, and it really pains me to be the guy who has to defend EA after what they did to Dragon Age II, but it could be bad for video games in the long run.

There are a few reasons why this trend concerns me.

Developers have many skills and abilities that allow them to make amazing games and tell incredible stories through this still relatively new medium. However, for the most part, when a developer goes out and hires someone, they aren’t necessarily concerned about their business acumen. This means that these companies simply don’t have the experience to handle the kind of money that Star Citizen has raised.

See, making games is not about throwing cash at a development team and telling them to turn that money into software. Every new feature requires more staff to create it. More staff need more equipment, managers, and space to work. Its easy to see how the costs can increase pretty quickly the more ambitious you want to be, and we haven’t even discussed how all these new features that get added suddenly need to be tested. Publishers like EA and Ubisoft have been around for a long time and while they might not know exactly how to make the game, they certainly know how to manage its development, keep it on track, and not be overwhelmed by the ever increasing size and scope of the project.

In addition to taking them out of their depth, I would also wager than most video game developers are inherently creative creatures. They have a vision for how they want to create this world and its story. They start with an idea and build the game and all its systems around that core idea, whether that is the open world of Elder Scrolls, the faithful recreation of a historic period and place in Assassins Creed, or the epic quest to save the princess in Legend of Zelda. All of these start out as ideas by creative minded people. And what happens when you suddenly tell a creative person that they no longer have the financial barrier to crafting their individual vision?

They get creative and the production time will quickly begin to swell as the budget does. This is something we have already seen with the aforementioned Broken Age, which was split into two Acts and the first released earlier this year while the second pushed back to 2015 due to their Kickstarter raising more than seven times their initial goal. This caused a lot of grief from fans, who grew impatient (one of the defining characteristics of a gamer) and demanded to know why the game they were responsible for financing wasn’t being released in the time it had been promised.

In a lot of cases, this is where publishers come in. Publishers like EA are the ones who impose deadlines on the developers in exchange for getting the game out there to the masses. Sometimes, this is a terrible thing (see the Dragon Age example above) but I would wager that, in the cases of smaller production teams, this would actually be helpful. Without the looming threat of a deadline, I know that I wouldn’t have passed any classes at university and my work would never get done even today when I’m essentially a proper grown up person. Without deadlines, creative people explore and wander and generally don’t get the work done when it needs to be.

So do I think that crowdfunding is a completely terrible idea? Not at all. When talented developers like Double Fine studios have trouble finding financial backers for their weird, trippy experiments in gaming that unfortunately don’t manage to bring in the sales publishers hope for (I’m looking at you, Psychonauts), then anything we can do to get them the chance to create is only going to enrich the industry as an art form. However, there are drawbacks to these hyper-successful Kickstarters, of which Star Citizen is a perfect example of, and it would be silly not to acknowledge them. As much as I dislike them most of the time, I think that sometimes we need the publishers to keep these creative madmen in line.

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