Harmonix had a successful run on Kickstarter last year, raising $844,000 to fund a remake of the rhythm action game Amplitude. It's next game will be crowdfunded as well, but it won't be on Kickstarter. While the new project hasn't actually been revealed, the studio has announced that it will seek funding through Fig, the new, games-only crowdfunding platform announced last month.
Fig is different from Kickstarter in a few significant ways. It's exclusive to videogames, and it will only run one or two campaigns at a time, alternating between what it calls "triple-I games"—basically triple-A indies—and projects from newer, less-established studios. More significantly, it allows equity investment in projects alongside conventional pledges. It also boasts an advisory board featuring some of the biggest names in crowdfunding success stories: Brian Fargo, Feargus Urquhart, and Tim Schafer. They will now be joined by Alex Rigopulos, a co-founder and chief creative officer at Harmonix.
"Harmonix has successfully gone the traditional crowdfunding route before, and now we are looking to explore offering both rewards as well as investment opportunities to the community when we launch our next title via Fig in Q4 of 2015," Rigopulos said in a statement.
Fig currently has just one project on the go, the space exploration game Outer Wilds. It looks really interesting, but it's not setting any crowdfunding speed records. Equity investment in the game, limited to "accredited investors," hit its $50,000 limit just two days after the project debuted, but conventional backing has been much slower in coming in: After almost three weeks, the effort is now sitting at $106,000 in combined funding, some way short of its $125,000 goal.
