Kickstarter is dead, and publishers are fixated on analytics — the creator of Monkey Island complained about the difficulties in funding games
Veteran game industry developer Ron Gilbert, creator of the Monkey Island universe, gave an interview to the portal ArsTechnica. During the conversation, he touched on the topic of game financing and admitted that securing funds has become more challenging than before.
Return to Monkey Island
Gilbert came to this conclusion after unsuccessful attempts to secure funding for the development of a large-scale pixel RPG in the spirit of the original The Legend of Zelda. He mentioned that he began considering this game after releasing Return to Monkey Island in 2022 and even hired an artist and designer. However, Gilbert soon realized that the three of them couldn't handle it alone, and expanding the team required substantial funds. So, he started pitching the game to publishers, but they turned out to be much more frugal than the developer had hoped.
"The amounts they were willing to invest and the terms they offered seemed utterly senseless to me," recalled Gilbert.
In Gilbert's opinion, securing financing has become more complicated partly due to the game's not-so-popular genre. Nevertheless, he is convinced that major publishers now place too much emphasis on analytics and figures instead of experiments, which has also affected the situation.
"Large companies apparently just use formulas to calculate the potential revenue from games. As a result, they release a bunch of games that look exactly like last year's because that's guaranteed to make money," the developer stated.
It's noteworthy that during the development of Thimbleweed Park, Gilbert solved a similar problem through Kickstarter funding. A decade has passed since then, and the developer believes that over the years, the platform as a funding tool has "practically died."
Ultimately, Gilbert canceled his pixel RPG, but the work on it wasn't entirely in vain. Some ideas were later used in Death by Scrolling — a vertical roguelike released on October 28, 2025, for PC.