Giving Ads The Boot

Two podcasts I listen to (Hypercritical & Build & Analyze) both mentioned the Penny Arcade Kickstarter, and I wanted to throw my change into the ring too.

If you’ve been living under a rock, you might’ve missed the Penny Arcade Kickstarter. It’s a daring plan - if readers want to see Penny Arcade without ads, they can put their money where their mouth is and donate.

The Kickstarter is done in increments, rather than an all-or-nothing bid: currently, it looks like Jerry & Mike will be removing the top ‘leaderboard’ ad on the Penny Arcade homepage. If viewers donate more money, they’ll remove progressively more and more ads until PA goes not only ad-free, but also Creative Commons licensed. Audacious.

Increments & Expectation

Both Marco & Dan said that they would have preferred Penny Arcade to do the Kickstarter in an all-or-nothing bid, citing possible confusion (customers who donate money might feel pretty crappy if only the leaderboard ad gets removed). I see their point, but I don’t think Penny Arcade’s primary goal was to remove all ads from their site, with Automata, Lookouts, & Strip Search being bonuses. If that was the case, those items would be bonuses along the way, rather than coming before all ads being removed on the site. Each of those projects is a fairly lengthy that is likely taking the place of advertising that doesn’t go on the main site.

A lot of the work Mike & Jerry do is creative comic strips for advertisers, known externally as ‘Penny Arcade Presents’. This includes the Zelda Skyward Sword comic, the Splinter Cell comic, and all the rest. They also do work for companies like the ESRB.

I think we can agree that the Penny Arcade team stays busy.

I think their true goal with this Kickstarter is to have the freedom to do their own original work. While Mike was breathless at being able to do Zelda artwork, I think he’s equally enthused about the possibility of having the time to do Lookouts.

Could a fan possibly be pissed that he donated $50 to remove all ads, only to end up with the leaderboard ad and an Automata strip? Sure, it’s possible. But I think that is a small group compared to the people who are donating not to remove webpage ads, but to direct Mike & Jerry to do their own original work. That’s why I backed their project.

Backer Rewards

I love the backer rewards they’ve done. Most Kickstarter projects use backer rewards as a preorder system; pay $50 to receive one iPhone accessory, $80 for two, $100 for two with a laser engraving on one … 

The Penny Arcade backer rewards are pretty awesome, ranging from prints of their artwork to original paintings and appearing in a strip. But my favourites are the $2500 rewards, of which there are three:
Have Mike (the artist) look over your art portfolio, providing notes & opinions.
Have Jerry (the writer) do a ‘beta read’ of a work in progress, providing notes & opinions.
Have Khoo (the business dude) analyze your business plan, identifying areas of opportunity.
I love that reward range; for a relatively low price you can get somebody who very well could be a huge inspiration for you to look at your work. That is so cool; if I was an artist, I’d take out a loan to chat with Mike about my art. Same with Khoo if I had a business plan. As someone who writes, I’d absolutely have Jerry look at my writing, if I was proud of it (frankly, I’d be embarrassed to have him look at my ravings about Sony losing my credit card info).

Success

One of the difficulties of using something like Kickstarter is that it presents a mixed message. Following the Double-Fine success, some people see the fact that they didn’t get the million dollars in a day as a failure (Double-Fine raised over $3million). That’s a poor comparison: people backing the Double-Fine game are pre-ordering a game. Early Penny Arcade backer awards are just jokes (“Gabe will think about you during sex”), until you spend $25 or more. You can’t compare revenue for an actual game and for a “remove ads” campaign.

Calling this anything other than a success is an incredibly short-sighted view on the situation. The success of this Kickstarter so far has freed up enough time for the Penny Arcade folks to do a 6-page original comic strip and provided enough money for them to remove the headlining, front-page ad on their website. If you don’t consider that a success, you aren’t hooked up right. At the very least, this is a blow to the advertising industry. If they don’t do this next year, Penny Arcade will still have a new bargaining chip: “We don’t need you as much as we used to”. This could be a flash in the pan, or it could be really, really interesting.

I really, really hope they make enough for the Strip Search web show, and I think they certainly can. So if you haven’t done so already, consider how much you enjoy Penny Arcade, especially their original stuff. If you like it, consider tossing in a buck or ten.

Linked List: PA Report

Mike Krahulik (Gabe), writing over at Penny-Arcade:

It does not update every twenty minutes. It is not just a source for press releases, and we are not interested in top ten lists. The PAR is focused on longer form journalism with in-depth research and interviews.

Where do I sign up? Oh, here (to clarify, it’s a website; no signup required). They’ve already got a big ‘ol interview with Gabe Newell, a tour through Valve’s offices, a look at the Dear Esther game/not game, and some other stuff. Pretty sweet stuff!

Linked List: Inevitability

Today’s Penny-Arcade, by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik:

It says “we have made a game that no right thinking person would purchase.”  Doesn’t it?  Except, in practice, that’s not what happens.

Don’t miss the accompanying comic. Looks like I’m not the only one surprised by The Old Republic’s pricing.

Linked List: It Only Doesn't

Tycho, over at Penny Arcade:

The thing to say on your web is that since PSN is free you can’t really complain about it, and that’s pretty dumb. Maybe you could have said that if you couldn’t play Ratchet and Clank online with your Playstation 2, but that era is fucking over. By “that era,” I’m referring to the one where chains of appliance “islands” exist in millions of discrete universes across the globe. The store, your friends list, these aren’t perks. By 2011, they’re bedrock assertions of the medium. The deal they made with users - one which, for years, was the justification for a gruesome price disparity - was “free Xbox Live,” not “shit happens.”

My biggest issue is with Sony’s silence and their attitude that their customers shouldn’t be pissed. Here’s the latest update from Patrick Seybold, Senior Director of Corporate Communication & Social Media:

I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online. Unfortunately, I don’t have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time.

As we previously noted, this is a time intensive process and we’re working to get them back online quickly. We’ll keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We once again thank you for your patience.

Umm … thanks? There was no point to that communication. If you want to garner goodwill with customers who love your failing services, be humble, be honest, and apologize. That response sounds like an AI, but not in an awesome GLaDOS way. Honestly, it sounds dismissive, sort of like “Well, I should put something up, but I don’t really care what”.

Server maintenance, especially emergency server maintenance that may or may not be related to “external intrustions”, can take time. I’m fine with that. And I’m not paying a dime for the service itself. That’s fine. People like myself are pissed not because we paid money for missing services, but because we want to use them. I wonder what PSN games & demos would have launched today. What if I wanted to grab Fancy Pants Adventure, or play Marvel vs Capcom? I know people who bought Portal 2 & Mortal Kombat on the PS3, looking to play together. These games launched a week ago today, and why aren’t they working? Sony’s response is inadequate, and the fact that the outage has lasted this long is embarrassing.

But I’m glad that Sony is focusing on the real issue here: announcing more Playstation certified tablets! (Yes, I know that different sections of the Sony corporation are involved here and I’m actually just being facetious about mocking them for announcing these tablets, although the irony of releasing tablets based on the “self-proclaimed-open” Android OS after the GeoHot incident is rather ironic).

I understand the issues that Sony is facing, and I know it takes time to fix issues. Of course, these issues may be caused because some people hate Sony, but that’s a whole other ballgame. The length of this outage is embarrassing, but Sony’s PR treatment of the issue is laughable. The failing of their network as well as the handling of this situation can only be described as incompetence. The only other time I’ve used the Incompetence tag was for the PS3 auto-formatting hard drives, but I feel that this situation also warranted the tag.

Linked List: One Of Many Possible Responses

Tycho (Jerry), over at Penny Arcade:

These days Duke remembered as the game with boobs in it, or is the game about boobs, or is executed by running boobs.exe, or is the one about a dumb jerk. The terrible thing is that, yeah, a lot of it was dumb.  Is dumb.  But while 3D Realms was doing away with taste and chivalry, they also did away with a bunch of other cruft that still clings to the genre.

A typically excellent piece. I don’t often link to Penny Arcade solely because I consider them essential reading for gamers; I wish we could just beam it directly to our neural pathways. A man can hope, right?