Fig turns a profit for some investors
Crowdfunding/investment site has provided positive returns on two of three released games, and one unreleased one
It's been two and a half years since the Fig let people support crowdfunding projects for a share of the revenues, and the early returns have been promising. Fig today revealed information on its first three released games, and a fourth as-yet-unreleased title that has turned a profit for backers.
Of the three released games--Kingdoms & Castles, Solstice Chronicles: MIA, and Trackless--the first two have already turned a profit for investors, with Kingdoms & Castles tripling supporters' money. Solstice Chronciles has barely made back its original money for investors (104.3%), but there's room for that to grow as revenue sharing on sales will continue through July of 2020. As for Trackless, Fig said backers have only seen 12.2% of their money returned to date, with revenue sharing ending in September of 2020.
Investors in a fourth project, Outer Wilds, didn't need to wait for the game to launch to cash out. They received 220% of their initial investment after Fig sold its rights to the game to Annapurna Interactive.
Fig noted that if an investor put the same amount of money into each of those projects, they would have seen a 59% return on investment on an average holding period of under a year.
"In just two years, we already have seen four games that were community published on Fig generate returns to investors," Fig CEO Justin Bailey said. "The speed of these returns to individual investors is unprecedented for our industry. As gamers increasingly reject donation-only crowdfunding, our model of community publishing provides indie developers with a now-proven method to bring their artistic creations to life."
This is shaping up to be a big year for Fig, as a dozen projects funding on the platform are expected to launch by the end of 2018. Included among those are two of the site's four biggest projects to date: Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (which raised $4.4 million) and Phoenix Point ($766,000). Two more prominent Fig titles, Psychonauts 2 ($3.8 million) and Wasteland 3 ($3.1 million) are not expected until at least 2019.