Penny Arcade starts a Kickstarter for no good reason

[kebab4you]

They want to remove the advertising from their site.

Sounds reasonable enough.

Except it´s not what kickstarter is for ...

http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

"Projects, projects, projects. As in all categories, Kickstarter is for projects that can be completed, not things that require maintenance to exist. This means no e-commerce sites, web businesses, or social networking sites. (Yes, this means Kickstarter wouldn?t be allowed on Kickstarter. Funny, but true.)"

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I thought the Penny Arcade guys were pretty wealthy already...I'd rather give the money to Leels for her new Name Game venture for example.

I have no problem with people donating to it because it's their money but it seems a bit of a weird choice of cause though. Especially just to do it for one year.

I mean I go to the Penny Arcade site all the time and I don't even notice the ads.
*shrug* live and let live I guess...

 

[castlewise]

No ads will be nice, but I'm more excited about the lookout and automata (and most likely CTS) strips that will also come out of this if it does well enough.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

People in here apparently forget that Child's Play exists. The chances of this money going straight to the charity, and Mike and Jerry just paying for lack of ad revenue out-of-pocket, seems very likely. These guys aren't rockstars of gaming culture, they're more like... and I hate to use this word, but I think it true... innovators. They won't just ask for money like this if they didn't think it would be worth doing it for those who receive the final product.

 

[Ralphfromdk]

There is something very annoying about seeing that bald guy drawing himself with glorious long hair.

You shouldn't be making comments on things you don't know anything about. So let me help you out here for a brief moment.

It's Gabe(pig nose)that does the art. Tycho(bald)didn't come up with the character looks.

 

[Schadrach]

So they are sexist idiots then, huh? Why adress things properly if you can go the easy way and do the same thing the gaming community has done for years: Attack every women who opens her mouth against video games by harassing her.

And also no, most of the negative backlash was not adressing her research. You may see, I wrote "negative backlash" and not criticism.

I'm still awaiting the same hatred towards PA or the "gaminc community" will lose the small rest of credibility they have in my eyes.

*looks around to see if anyone else will say it*
No?
Okay.
Where are the death threats and the rape threats and the people tearing their hair out with rage?

OT- Do people not know what adblock is? And whyyyyyyyyy?
Still, if you're mad enough to throw money at stuff like that, who am I to judge.

You're not going to see as much of it on Kickstarter itself, since you have to be a project backer (and thus give them money) in order to post. Not a lot of people are going to pay them money to complain about how stupid the idea of paying them money is.

Now, if you want to see a similar hate storm (it will vary mostly in the particular epithets used, since it will center around the recognizable traits of the PA guys rather than those of a certain web video creator), then they need to repost their video somewhere that will allow public comment, not use moderation, and immediately begin spamming the hell out of the chans. Bonus points if they preemptively act justified about being trolled before it happens.

Then again, the PA guys are also wildly popular comics who run major gaming conventions and, you know, Child's Play. The biggest source of hatred towards them prior to this is refusing to back down when certain groups cry about the content of their comics (having only ever done so once under legal threat, that being the Strawberry Shortcake comic), and in fact responding aggressively instead.

Isn't this against Kickstarter's TOS?

I thought the site was for start-up projects to get money to, well, start up. Not for already established things to get more money.

Anita Sarkeesian is already well-established as a blogger and video maker.

You HAD to go there, didn't you?

Technically Phasmal was the first to bring her up, I think, but it is a valid comparison.

 

[Volkov]

Kind of reminds me of Child's Play... a very powerful company effectively sucking money from those that need it more, be it legitimate medicine, shelter and life-or-death-related charities, or in this case, actual projects on Kickstarter.

And of course they'll easily get this money, probably all of their goals. How can they not, it's Penny Arcade.

 

[Comando96]

Who cares? If you don't approve, don't back the kickstarter!

This?

I mean if you donate to the Escapist you don't have to see any adds and this is exactly the same, except done through a different medium... kickstater. This is down to the fact kickstarter is so popular... and it grabs a headline from people drawing attention to the fact they are doing such a "controversial thing".

 

[Korolev]

No good reason? Agreed! However, they live in the US, where anyone has the right to start any sort of kickstarter for any legal reason, and anyone has the right to give them money for that reason. If they want to start a near pointless kickstarter, good for them. If fans want to give them their money, well, more power to them, I guess. I'm not going to tell people how to spend their cash. If they think giving money to some already rich guys for virtually nothing is a good idea, who am I to tell them otherwise.

 

[Souleks]

Who wouldn't pay 15$ for Gabe to think about them during sex?

 

[DoomyMcDoom]

And people wanted to claim that the brony documentary was a rip off? HA. Gabe and Tycho to the rescue! Bringing real perspective to people all over the internets by showing them just how greedy two people who are already plenty rich can really be!

They want to remove the advertising from their site.

Sounds reasonable enough.

Yeah, seems legit enough. All they're asking for is ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Now I'm not saying that Penny Arcade is run by Dr. Evil....I'm just heavily implying it.

More seriously, this is a terrible deal. If maintaining their site without ads for ONE YEAR costs them one million dollars (especially when most of their ads appear to be PA-related ads and thus cost them NOTHING), perhaps it's time to start looking into your company finances.

And it's fairly clear that most of the offers are worth practically nothing. You don't even get a physical object until the $125 mark. You can get followed by one of the PA guys for only $300? Wowie! Or I can just talk to celebrities on Twitter for free! Tough call.

Well, let's break this down a bit then shall we?

First off, I just went on PA to look at their page. The ONLY ad I saw was one banner at the top for one of their seasons. This really isn't advertising for anything. Checking out two other sites, both for movie reviews, Red Letter Media and That Guy With The Glasses, I found their sides and banners to each have several ads on them, with TGWTG also including ones before the start of videos. Compared to this, again, Penny Arcade has a SINGLE banner one for their own shows, and nothing before the start of their videos. The amount of profit they generate from this is... $0.00

Second off, let's look at some of their costs. For the size of Penny Arcade, I've seen a few figures thrown around in this thread, but the one that caught my eye 14. Now, with 14 on salary, let's say you pay them $50,000.

Cost: $700,000

That's just employee wages here, nothing more. While the figures are speculation, they aren't out of line I believe. Now, let's look at some other costs they have.

PA Scholarship: $10,000
Server Costs: ???
Show Costs:
- Blamimations
- Check Point
- Extra Credits
- Shut Up & Sit Down
- The Adventures of Ledo and Ix
- Mega 64

All those shows (I believe, could be wrong either way by including one that isn't, or not including one that is) are done by people outside of Penny Arcade. That means that they need to pay them something for those shows.

And this is just skimming the surface as for costs they'd likely encounter. These are the things that you can pick up on the surface. There are plenty of other costs that are associated with running a business that I'm sure could also be tacked onto this.

Now what are PA's sources of revenue? Well, you can buy a shirt from them, a game, some merchandise... And that's about it right now. They do run Child's Play but that's a charity so it's not for profit, and they do have PAX, which I'm not sure how much they might generate from that, but aside from that, there really isn't any method of earning money from it.

If you think just because something is well known that it automatically generates money, you are wrong. The way it generates money from a name is by allowing others to use that name to get traffic from them (advertising). A great example of this would be XKCD. No advertising at all, ever, the only thing sold is a few pieces of merchandise on their store page. That's it. The difference between XKCD and PA though is that PA has a staff that it needs to pay, more content, and is far bigger than just a lone guy doing comics. That means that going with a model that is advertising free is much harder.

If I were PA though, I'd also add subscription services to the website to help generate revenue. Say $15 semi-annually, $25 annually, something like that. Least that way they'd be generating a more consistent income from their userbase. They've gone the method of using a Kick Starter though, which may make them more money in the end, but is less consistent in how much they'll earn year to year if they rely on it.

So no, trying to reach $1,000,000 as a goal does not seem that much when you actually consider the costs that PA likely goes through annually. In fact, I would probably think they'd go through more.

Edit: Upon review, I forgot that I only viewed thier page for Extra Credits. I went onto their main page shortly after to find they had one additional spot on the side of their front page. If refreshed a few times, the only paid one that seems to come up is for some Magic The Gathering arcade game, which only seems to appear 1/3 of the time.

Why would they be paying all of their employees $50,000 salary?
Also if you look at HOW LONG they've been around without the need of a kickstarter or kickstarter-esque donation system, it's doubtful that they really need this money to keep things together.

just saying, it's a pretty plain and obvious cash grab, combined with a minor social engineering project to see just how much shit your popularity can get outa people who like you...

I'm not donating, mainly because I find penny arcade fairly uninteresting, I mean they have some funny shit I am not going to say otherwise, but most of it's kinda bland.

 

[malestrithe]

I'm only quoting you because I agree with everything you say and I feel that this way there's twice the chance of people reading your post on their way to drop off their inane wailing.

Hello. Welcome to the Internet. It is a vast wasteland where everyone think they are right, where no one is wrong, and debates are really battles of attrition where the winner is the one that does nor give up first.

People are going to be upset not matter what. The ones that complain the loudest will do so for the reason that they hate Penny Arcade for existing. It maybe a deeper reason than that, but existing is good enough for this argument. Sorry, but that's the way of the Internet.

To be honest, this does not bother me like it should. It might be a breach of service or whatever, but I don't care, I'm just glad that it Internet celebrities that are doing this and not Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

 

[rob_simple]

I'm only quoting you because I agree with everything you say and I feel that this way there's twice the chance of people reading your post on their way to drop off their inane wailing.

Hello. Welcome to the Internet. It is a vast wasteland where everyone think they are right, where no one is wrong, and debates are really battles of attrition where the winner is the one that does nor give up first.

People are going to be upset not matter what. The ones that complain the loudest will do so for the reason that they hate Penny Arcade for existing. It maybe a deeper reason than that, but existing is good enough for this argument. Sorry, but that's the way of the Internet.

To be honest, this does not bother me like it should. It might be a breach of service or whatever, but I don't care, I'm just glad that it Internet celebrities that are doing this and not Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

I have no idea why you felt the need to quote me in this post, but thanks for turning my mail icon yellow, all the same; it brightens up my day.

 

[malestrithe]

I'm only quoting you because I agree with everything you say and I feel that this way there's twice the chance of people reading your post on their way to drop off their inane wailing.

Hello. Welcome to the Internet. It is a vast wasteland where everyone think they are right, where no one is wrong, and debates are really battles of attrition where the winner is the one that does nor give up first.

People are going to be upset not matter what. The ones that complain the loudest will do so for the reason that they hate Penny Arcade for existing. It maybe a deeper reason than that, but existing is good enough for this argument. Sorry, but that's the way of the Internet.

To be honest, this does not bother me like it should. It might be a breach of service or whatever, but I don't care, I'm just glad that it Internet celebrities that are doing this and not Trey Parker or Matt Stone.

I have no idea why you felt the need to quote me in this post, but thanks for turning my mail icon yellow, all the same; it brightens up my day.

You're the one that thinks reposting a log diatribe against haters will make a difference. That's why I reposted your quote.