Fig is a
crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...
platform for video games. It launched in August 2015. Unlike traditional crowdfunding approaches like
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...
, where individuals can back a project to receive rewards, Fig uses a mixed model that includes individual backing and the opportunity for uncredited investors to invest as to obtain a share of future revenues for successful projects. At the end of 2017, four projects had begun generating returns, returning 245% to Fig investors.
History
Fig was founded in August 2015 by Justin Bailey (formerly,
COO
COO or coo may refer to:
Business
* Certificate of origin, used in international trade
* Chief operating officer or chief operations officer, high-ranking corporate official
* Concept of operations, used in Systems Engineering Management Process
...
of
Double Fine Productions),
and Bob Ippolito. The advisory board is composed of executives from across the video game industry with previous experience in crowdfunding and investing in video game projects:
Aaron Isaksen of the
Indie Fund The Indie Fund is an organization created by several independent game developers to help fund budding indie video game development. The Indie Fund was created in early 2010, its purpose aimed "to encourage the next generation of game developers" b ...
,
Brian Fargo
Frank Brian Fargo (born December 15, 1962) is an American video game designer, producer, programmer and executive, and founder of Interplay Entertainment, inXile Entertainment and Robot Cache.
Biography
Early life
A descendant of the family ...
of
inXile Entertainment
inXile Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and a studio of Xbox Game Studios based in Tustin, California. Specializing in role-playing video games, inXile was founded in 2002 by Interplay co-founder Brian Fargo. The studi ...
,
Feargus Urquhart
Feargus Urquhart is a Scottish-American video game designer and CEO of Obsidian Entertainment.
Career
Urquhart is best known for his work at Interplay Entertainment, particularly as leader of Black Isle Studios, Interplay's internal ro ...
of
Obsidian Entertainment
Obsidian Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Irvine, California. It was founded in June 2003, shortly before the closure of Black Isle Studios, by ex-Black Isle employees Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Chris Par ...
, and
Tim Schafer
Timothy John Schafer (born July 26, 1967) is an American video game designer. He founded Double Fine Productions in July 2000, after having spent over a decade at LucasArts. Schafer is best known as the designer of critically acclaimed games '' ...
of Double Fine Productions. The platform is backed by funding from
Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.
Hi ...
.
Alex Rigopulos
Alexander Peter Rigopulos (born 1970s in Boxford, Massachusetts) is an American video game designer and musician, best known as the former CEO and current creative director of Harmonix Music Systems, a company he founded with Eran Egozy in 1995 ...
, from
Harmonix
Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., doing business as Harmonix, is an American video game developer company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in May 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. Harmonix is perhaps best known as bei ...
, and
Cliff Bleszinski
Cliff Bleszinski (; born February 12, 1975), popularly known as CliffyB, is an American video game designer, known for his work in the development of the ''Unreal'' and '' Gears of War'' series. After working at Epic Games from 1992 to 2012, he ...
, formerly of
Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, M ...
and
Boss Key Productions
Boss Key Productions, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in April 2014 by Cliff Bleszinski and Arjan Brussee, formerly of Epic Games, the company developed ''LawBreakers'' (2017) and ''Radical ...
, and
Randy Pitchford
Randy Pitchford is an American businessman. He co-founded the video game development studio Gearbox Software in 1999 and was president and CEO for the company until 2021, upon which he became CEO and president of Gearbox's parent company, The G ...
of
Gearbox Software
Gearbox Software is an American video game development company based in Frisco, Texas. It was established as a limited liability company in February 1999 by five developers formerly of Rebel Boat Rocker. Randy Pitchford, one of the founders, s ...
have since joined the advisory board of Fig.
The company was initially backed by seed funding from
Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.
Hi ...
.
In January 2017, it obtained another $7.84 million in funding from Spark and
Greycroft Partners
Greycroft is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Set ...
, among other smaller investors.
The name "Fig" derives from Hotel Figueroa, located along
Figueroa Street
Figueroa Street is a major north-south street in Los Angeles County, California, spanning from the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington north to Eagle Rock. A short, unconnected continuation of Figueroa Street runs just south of Marengo Driv ...
, a short distance from the
Los Angeles Convention Center
The Los Angeles Convention Center is a convention center in the southwest section of downtown Los Angeles. It hosts multiple annual conventions and has often been used as a filming location in TV shows and movies.
History
The convention center, ...
where the annual
Electronic Entertainment Expo
E3 (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo or Electronic Entertainment Experience in 2021) is a trade event for the video game industry. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) organizes and presents E3, which many developers, publisher ...
is traditionally held; Hotel Figueroa became a common social hub during these E3 events.
Fig was acquired by Republic, a larger crowdfunding investment company, in April 2020. Fig will continue to operate as it has under Republic, though there will be opportunities to access more investors for projects through Republic's investment capital as a result. This allowed Fig to open up to more expansive campaigns including those related to hardware; with the announcement of the Republic acquisition, for example, Fig launched the campaign to allow crowdfunding or investment into the
Intellivision Amico
The Intellivision Amico is an upcoming home video game console that is being developed and marketed by Intellivision Entertainment. It was originally slated to be released in October 2020, but repeated delays followed, leaving the console with ...
microconsole. After acquisition, Justin Bailey remained as a board member at Republic to help the post-merger integration.
Approach
Fig is offered as an alternative means for funding video game development from traditional crowdfunding sites like
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...
. The goal of Fig is to allow not only the traditional backing of a video game as with normal crowdfunding, but to also enable those that can invest in a game's development to receive a portion of the game's profits once it is released, in addition to other typical rewards that crowdfunded projects allow.
During their initial growth period, Fig limited investors in such projects to those that have accredited assets of over $1 million, with plans that once off the ground, anyone will be able to contribute and invest in their offered projects.
Due to the
Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act
The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act, is a law intended to encourage funding of small businesses in the United States by easing many of the country's securities regulations. It passed with bipartisan support, and was signed int ...
which changed how
the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) treated crowdfunding, Fig will allow anyone to invest at a minimum of $1,000 into future campaigns starting in December 2015. However, there were initially some issues with gaining SEC approval to collect funds from unaccredited investors, holding up the funding for some of the campaigns after this point such as ''Psychonauts 2'', and Fig has been supplying the requested funds to developers through internal support and investment. In September 2016, the SEC approved Fig's plan allowing unaccredited investors to purchase Fig Game Shares once campaigns have succeeded. While future campaigns will also require their SEC review for unaccredited investors, work for establishing the mechanism for the ''Psychonauts 2'' campaign by Fig and its legal firm should streamline these subsequent reviews. Fig had adapted a plan to account for unaccredited investors that may opt to not providing the funding during the course of a SEC review; Fig will still provide the full amount of money committed at the time of the campaign to the developers, and will hold any unpaid unaccredited share for sale that others can subsequently purchase as to otherwise keep the same percentages of equity between accredited and unaccredited shareholders.
The concept for allowing investments of this nature resulted from the advisory board members' previous experience with Kickstarter campaigns, in which those that backed at the largest amounts typically were the least disruptive of the development process as they likely had the most trust in the game developer to complete the title as offered, according to Bailey.
They also took inspiration from the success of
Oculus VR
Reality Labs is a business of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon ...
, the company formed to develop their
Oculus Rift
Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a division of Meta Platforms, released on March 28, 2016.
In 2012 Oculus initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund the Rift's development, af ...
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...
hardware through a $2.5 million Kickstarter campaign and eventually was sold to
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
for $2 billion. Bailey believes that the most invested fans of such projects should be able to have a portion of those profits for a highly successful title.
Because Fig uses both traditional backing as well as investment support, potential investors will be able to judge on a project's viability based on how many backers the project has accrued, which can help derisk their investment.
According to Schafer, he hopes that this will create a reputation for games that would fall somewhere between
AAA titles and
indie games
An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. ...
, allowing for smaller teams to develop games with larger budgets (on the order of millions of dollars) that normally require large publication deals.
Schafer also felt that with average crowd-funding projects typically seeking funds via Kickstarter, there is a growing fatigue in the area, where only certain niche projects, such as "
Exploding Kittens
''Exploding Kittens'' is a casual dedicated deck card game designed by Matthew Inman of ''The Oatmeal'' webcomic, Elan Lee and Shane Small, and first published by ''The Oatmeal'' in 2015. Beginning as a Kickstarter project seeking US$10,000 in ...
", gain attention, and considered Fig a means to counter that fatigue for games that did not fit those niches.
Fig's approach is designed to support only one or two campaigns at a time, in contrast to the volume that are offered by Kickstarter or other crowdfunding services. Projects will be curated by Fig for viability and interest before they are supported,
and will allow them to customize the website's project page for the game title to enhance its appeal.
Fig may expand to have more concurrent projects if the platform proves successful.
Fig will not require projects to accept investment support as long they offer typical backing options.
As part of their support, Fargo, Urquhart, and Schafer have said that all future games developed by their respective studios will use Fig-based funding.
In February 2017, Fig announced it has established a "Fig Finishing Fund" available to those projects that have been successfully backed on Fig as to help complete any late-stage development hurdles or final publishing and marketing pushes. Should projects qualify, they will be able to obtain at $20,000 from the Finishing Fund. In 2017, Fig set aside $500,000 of its own funds available for the Finishing Fund pool.
Fig created a secondary monetization approach "Open Access" in May 2019 that is based on the
early access
Early access, also known as alpha access, alpha founding, paid alpha, or game preview, is a funding model in the video game industry by which consumers can purchase and play a game in the various pre-release development cycles, such as pre-alph ...
release approach. After a game's initial funding is complete, users are still able to contribute to the game's funding under this Open Access period, running from as short as 30 days after the initial Fig investment period up to as late as the game's full release, gaining access to early builds of the game and other backer features.
Games funded
References
External links
*
{{Crowdfunding platforms
Crowdfunding platforms of the United States
Video game companies of the United States
Companies based in San Francisco
2015 in video gaming
Internet properties established in 2015
American companies established in 2015
Video game companies established in 2015
2015 establishments in California
2020 mergers and acquisitions