How One Guy Got Kickstarters to Give Their Profits to Other Campaigns

A screenshot from Wasteland 2 inExile Entertainment

Brian Fargo’s first real hit was an indie videogame called Wasteland. Hardcore gamers absolutely devoured the thing—a post-apocalyptic extravaganza—and Fargo went on to launch other games, including the now celebrated Fallout series, and even became a game publisher himself, as founder of Interplay Entertainment. But Wasteland was his baby, and by the early 2000s, he wanted to create a sequel to the game that put him on the map, called Wasteland 2.

The problem was, the studios wanted nothing to do with it. “I got nowhere for another decade,” Fargo says.

Then, in early 2012, Fargo stumbled upon a still up-and-coming company called Kickstarter that let creators raise funding from their friends and fans. “I told my company: ‘Stop everything,'” Fargo remembers. “‘This is our chance.”

And it was. Wasteland 2 went on to raise more than $3 million, far surpassing its $900,000 goal. Fargo was shocked, and ultimately, touched. “Kickstarter was fulfilling this dream of mine,” he says. “I thought: ‘How can I perpetuate this and make sure it keeps going?’ The way to do that is always money.”

So in the middle of the campaign, Fargo launched KickingItForward.org, a website that urged Kickstarter creators who reached their funding goal to pledge 5 percent of their profits to other Kickstarter campaigns. Fargo pledged to do the same. Since then, what started as a simple idea has grown into a widespread movement.

Thousands of Kickstarter creators have since pledged to kick it forward if they meet their goal. Of that group, more than 1,000 projects have been successfully funded. And while it’s hard to track whether people are following through on those pledges—after all, this is 5 percent of profits, not 5 percent of funds raised—Fargo says he has lots of anecdotal evidence that creators are staying true to their word. One company, he says, reported pumping $35,000 into other projects after their own game shipped.

“It’s like when people graduate from colleges and write those endowment checks. I look at it a similar way,” Fargo says. “It’s like, ‘Let’s give it back to others and give them a chance to be in our position.'”

The KickingItForward movement has grown bigger than Fargo ever imagined. At one point, he says, Kickstarter even began asking creators not to put the KickingItForward logo on their funding pages. “There was a point where people felt like if they didn’t support KickingItForward they wouldn’t get funded, like it’d make them look bad,” he says.

What’s unique about this initiative, unlike so many other types of digital activism which quickly flame out, is that—two years later—KickingItForward is still going strong. Now, Fargo says, at any given time there are around 60 new active projects posted on the site.

Of course, not all of them will get funded, and even if they do, not all of them will turn a profit. But some, like Wasteland 2, will. And if those successful creators can commit to support the community that once gave them a chance, then the impact that Kickstarter can have on individual inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs will multiply.

“Our ability to survive is going to be based on our ability to work with each other,” Fargo says. “This has brought me and my so-called competitors together closer than anything ever before.”