Well, good news for those of you in the United Kingdom who have a great game idea and some knowhow but seem to lack the funds to really make it happy. Instead of tossing your arms up and saying “Bloody ‘ell” (sorry! David Bowie is one of my heroes and I love British TV, really, I do!) you now have the same options that a lot of US-based game companies have been utilizing over the last year to a lot of hoopla; you can start a Kickstarter campaign and take hapless yanks’ money to build your dream project. So yes, there is a bit of a gravy train happening within the world of indie gaming and it is not just in the US anymore.
Interestingly enough, part of the reason that Kickstarter was US-centric for so long is that the method of payment for Kickstarter has been Amazon Payments, which for some reason would not work outside of the US. Kickstarter has gone out and found a new partner for UK-based projects to handle the payments. The good news is that the UK projects will not have their own page or section, they will be treated like any other project on Kickstarter and not relegated to their own section. Of course, the currency will be listed in Pounds Sterling as opposed to dollars, but you probably already figured that out by now. If you are outside of the UK and are interested in a project you’ll still be able to help fund a UK-based project, making it a very good idea for UK-based projects to consider Kickstarter for their crowd-funding needs.
The first UK Kickstarter project is up and I have literally no clue what it is, outside of being a videogame cabinet extension for something (Google has shown me that it is a single-board Linux computer). Of course, it is gaming, so Kickstarter in the UK starts off with a bang.
