Digital distribution has been hailed as a liberator for independent game production, and popular rhetoric surrounding crowdfunding has envisioned it as the perfect tool for launching independent games. The article is equally interested in how this subsector of game production relates to the growth and restructuring of the game industry over the past decade and the political economy of the crowdfunding production environment, that is, what consequences sidestepping the publisher via crowdfunding and digital distribution has for game developers. Drawing from Kerr (2017) and Johns (2006), the analysis uses the concepts of production network and production logic. The main aim of the article is to map out the different parties associated with traditional game production, how this production network evolves with productions using the crowdfunding model, and what kind of production logic can be applied to the crowdfunding production model. This article is interested in the crowdfunding model as an alternative production environment for games. As projects turn to emerging production network intermediaries, their significance-as well as that of the crowdfunding backers-provides evidence to classify the crowdfunding model as a new game production logic. In removing the publisher as an “unnecessary” middleman, crowdfunded productions need to take care of the many tasks that used to belong to publishers, such as marketing, partner sourcing, distribution networks, and customer relationships. Two successfully crowdfunded case examples- Bloodstained (2018), a digital game, and Conan (2016), a board game-are used to illustrate changes crowdfunding causes in the traditional game production environment. Adopting a game production studies perspective, this article focuses on crowdfunding as a new channel for independent game development and the shifts crowdfunding causes in the game production network.

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