Response: Kicking and Screaming: Penny Arcade and Kickstarter

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Steven Sukkau

Faces you can trust.

Steven Sukkau

People like Penny Arcade. They like giving them money, and no one is a fan of ads or “The Man”. I accept these statements as truisms, so you can imagine my surprise when the Penny Arcade founder’s campaign to crowd-source the popular web comic was met with mixed reviews.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the main objection seems to be, “I think the ads are great, why get rid of them?”

There are two reasons this has become a common response:

1. The ads are tasteful, attractive and not intrusive.

2. Fans trust the advertisement’s message on Penny Arcade.

Unlike the disruptive pop-ups or unsettling take-over ads of other sites, Penny Arcade paid messages are well designed. They promote games their fans are interested in, offering one of the best marriages of advertiser demographic and consumer interest possible. As well, PA’s ads are so well integrated with the main site that for many like myself, the banners have become part of the landscape of Penny Arcade; to lose them would be strange and unfamiliar.

I’m not alone in feeling this way. It seems as if there is a disconnect between creator and fan here, because Penny Arcade’s readers don’t appear to feel passionate about the cause in the same way that Mike and Jerry do. Cutting the banners simply doesn’t strike a chord with readers as a worthwhile pursuit.

So why throw millions of dollars back at your advertisers? Money that could be used to make cool things or maybe hire more people? The sense of “purity” Krahulik and Holkins are hoping fans will rally behind is uninspiring. Instead they’re left wondering why Penny Arcade would reject the money of developers when advertising has essentially become the act of promoting their colleagues in the games industry. Especially since, and this cannot be understated, Penny Arcade’s advertising is an anomaly in that it is such a perfect fit.

So, fans naturally ask, why not keep the ads, and kickstart individual projects? I would personally give an extravagant dollar amount to fund an automata project. Others have voiced a strong emotional connection to the Lookouts, or the resurrection of the podcast.

This is what is clear: that emotional attachment is the key to people’s wallets.

It seems fans are confused. While they explicitly trust Krahulik and Holkinsthe emotional connection to the campaign is weak. This leads me to believe the goal for complete artistic purity may be misguided here. Some fans will fund PA without ads because they asked them to, but many feel the creators have missed an even greater opportunity.

Already, over $350,000 has been pledged to remove ads. But I wonder how many would support Penny Arcade for other projects and accept the current advertising model.

This is a strange thing; I would pay to fund PA within reason of my budget, and tolerate advertising. Krahulik and Holkins may want an add-free Penny Arcade. The fans don’t, or worse, don’t care. I love PA, but I don’t want to pay extra for Jerry to think about me when having sex. However, I do want the opportunity to help fund the projects like Automata or to bring back the PA podcasts. However, they’re still receiving donations, and that appears to be because they’ve earned the trust of gamers. As fan Anthony Heim wrote on the campaign post, “Usually the ads you post are things I’ve already gotten… I’m supporting this because you guys deserve it.”

In other words, the PA kickstarter is trading on love and trust. In a response by the creators to the uproar regarding their kickstarter, Gabe acknowledges the inroads they’ve made in creating a positive advertising experience, recalling moments such as when they’ve missed out on creating official Star Wars canon because they didn’t like aspects of a particular Star Wars game.

They’ve stated that their true motivation for crowd funding lies in the outdated model of Internet advertising and the reliance on restricted content control to promote page views. “The advertising model is just not designed to be compatible with the way people want to share content these days,” Gabe writes. “Going forward I think that not being tied to advertising on the site would be best not just for us but for our readers.”

As Gabe says, “I don’t want to ever have to think about hurting our relationship with a publisher or making our ad guy’s jobs any harder. This KS is about working for you guys not for publishers.” If this was coming from any other figure in the games industry, perhaps we wouldn’t believe it; however, maybe what makes Penny Arcade “ our comic” is that there has always been the sense that the creators believe that they are working for their fans.

To hear Holkins and Krahulik tell it, Penny Arcade has always been solely for the fans, and now they have a chance to make it official, using our trust to pull us kicking and screaming into the future of the site. They’ve earned it until now, and with any luck, they will deserve it even in the future of this experiment.

Further Reading: Penny Arcade Sells Out: For Whom the Kickstarter Tolls (Medium Difficulty)

Klopstock and Kickstarter: Crowdfunding and the 18th Century (Medium Difficulty)

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  • See now I was under the impression the primary objection was that as figureheads and primary owners of several successful profit and non-profit organizations their demand for funds towards a goal with little yield to the funded (not donator) is antithetical to the supposed “spirit” of Kickstarter and casts them as predatory to their blindly supportive fans, to say nothing of their rich history of PR gaffes and reprehensible personal positions.

    Or something.

    • thestage

      Or the fact that penny arcade is an awful blight on whatever the fuck the video game community is.

  • http://twitter.com/CaramelZappa Caramelzappa

    It’s worth noting that even though they’re over 100% funded, they AREN’T getting rid of all the ads. Backers have only removed one ad. They have to reach 525K to actually remove all the ads. And don’t forget this is only for one year.

    The problem I have with this whole campaign is like Adam said. Penny Arcade is incredibly successful and runs several extremely profitable projects. Begging for money from their fans just seems greedy at this point.

    The other issue is that this campaign isn’t in line with what people want from Kickstarter. Kickstarter is interesting and inspiring because it allows crowd funding to enable fledgling businesses and developers to fund projects that otherwise would have never gotten off the ground. Penny Arcade is already well above the ground. They’re flying. They run one (several, really) of the biggest conventions in the industry and are incredibly (maybe dangerously) influential. They’re absolutely no reason they can’t fund any of these projects from the loads of money they already make/have.

    I don’t think that them asking for money AND continuing to profit from incredible ad revenue is a solution. It just comes off as even more greedy and exploitative. One of the journalists I follow compared Penny Arcades “sell out” to posting your amazon wishlist so that fans could send you things that you want. I’m inclined to agree, and to me it’s abusing and exploiting the love they’ve gotten from fans and the incredibly powerful position they have in the industry.

  • I feel like a lot of people are still missing the point of the PA KS. PA’s ads are not like on YouTube where you simply upload your video, click a box to allow pre-roll ads, and then profit from whatever ad YouTube plays before your video. PA actually spends their time choosing which ads to run and also creating content for said advertisers. It’s not about wanting to get rid of the ads because they’re intrusive. It’s about the fact that removing the ads frees up that time for them to create the content that their fans want. It’s not about them being greedy (as one commenter suggested), it’s about how willing the fans are to buy their time so that they can create the things that we want to see. As a fan, I am more than willing to chip in $50 to get to see more Automata and Lookouts rather than a banner for another game I already own.

  • Slothboy

    They’ve said many times that this is more about TIME than MONEY. The visible ads are just one part of what they do, they also spend TIME making comics and projects for advertisers to promote their (the advertisers) products. While I generally enjoy those projects too, their point is that if they didn’t have to do them they would have TIME to devote to more pet projects that are purely creative. They could have done a lookouts comic instead of the zelda comic.

    I work for a company that bills for services on an hourly basis, so I get what they are talking about. There are only so many hours in a day and the only person at PA that is actually drawing is Mike. I’m talking about a workday here. 8 hours. So they are giving fans the option to pay Mike for his time to draw things for them instead of for Activision or Nintendo, or whoever has contracted with them to produce promotional material.

    I have no issue with it and to those that do I say, just don’t give them money. It’s really easy. There is no need to debate or convince people you are right, just vote with ur monies. If you are right, and the fans don’t care about what the kickstarter represents, then that will be represented in the results.

    PA has also stated that this is just an experiment to see if people are interested in something like this. It gives them the opportunity to explore a different business model. I say, bravo. If they just lock themselves into one way of doing business then they are setting themselves up for real failure. Just like any company.