How Does The Success Of Hyper Light Drifter Present Crowdfunding As

An Effective Tool For Independent Creators?

Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D open world platform game that has been released since 2016 (5
years ago), it was developed by an independent game company titled ‘Heart Machine’- which
was founded in 2013. The game itself is built up with visuals in the style of ‘pixel art’, which is
a modernised take on the classic look of more vintage, pioneering age games, examples of this
are games like ‘Mario’ and ‘Sonic’. The game is centred around a character known as ‘The
Drifter’, who wakes up in a destroyed and desolate world, full of ancient technology and great
evil. You soon after, receive visions of great destruction (although they are very vague and
unclear) within these visions, you learn the ancient god ‘Anubis’ has tasked you with
destroying a hidden element- referred to as ‘The Immortal Cell’. From that point, you must
choose an area to explore from the central area of this world- a small town. You can travel
North, West and East to begin with. Being fully capable of exploring these areas to a great
amount of detail and specifics. The South however, is locked off until all other three directions
are explored- as it’s the hardest area to progress through.

The game heavily relies on the ‘show don’t tell’ rule within all forms of visual media, when it
comes to storytelling. It realises what a video game fundamentally has over any other form of
media- interactivity. Which it uses to it’s absolute advantage. It does this by allowing the
player to explore the world the developers have built, and learn the game’s mechanics, rules
and secrets without having to present a word of dialogue. Unlike many games, this one
expects the player to keep up in every way. There’s no reminders on the rules, in fact, there’s
no part of the game that outlines the rules. All of this is learned through your own intuition and
skill- which is why it feels far more rewarding when things go right. This approach is a very
important aspect within visual media, assuming your audience is stupid is insulting. Yet it
happens extremely often in many releases of TV, video games, films, etc.

Moving on from what Hyper Light Drifter is, and why the game itself is popular, it must be
understood as to how this game got to the stage it did. How was it made? How did it come to
be? The game really began it’s life on ‘Kickstarter’; a funding platform for creative projects
across all spectrums. The creator creates a goal and deadline that they’d need at a minimum to
create their particular project. If this is failed to be met, no backers will put money towards it
and the project will have failed. However if the project is exceeded, the money can reach any
amount- the project can become more ambitious and much less restricted. People pledge
money to these projects for a wide range of reasons, this can be as simple as wanting an idea
to be made, wanting to help a friend out or maybe the backer is interested in the rewards a
project can offer for them, such as a personalised individual experience or cool product that’s
exclusively available. Kickstarter is not made so that it can be used as an investment platform,
it’s simply a space people can watch ideas turn into something special. A major plus from this,
is that all creators keep 100% ownership of their work.

Hyper Light Drifter started out with aspirations of $27,000, a considerable amount of money-
but not much when it came to building a properly well functioning game. However it massively
exceeded this goal, ending up with a grand total of $645,158, although after percentages
were taken from Kickstarter and a few other parties they were left with an estimated amount
of $584,000 (which is still a considerably huge amount). They had a total of 24,150 backers on
the project and would consistently update the page every single day. On average they were
making $20,807 with 779 backers per day, an insane amount of growth.

Alx Preston is the creator of ‘Heart Machine’ and also began the whole project of Hyper Light
Drifter. Within the game, Preston made it so that the main character you play as (The Drifter)
has an awful, dangerous and life threatening disease. A number of times through-out the
game you cough up blood, followed by images of your own death. This is seemingly the
motive of your character, to find a cure by destroying ‘The Immortal Cell’. This was done, to
reflect the real world issue that Preston faces on a day to day basis. Since he was born, he has
dealt with Congenital Heart Disease and a large variety of digestive and immune system
problems, which has left him close to death many times. “This gives me a certain perspective
on life, and plays into the stories I want to tell" Preston, A. ‘How heart disease inspired one of
2016’s great games’, 2014. It could also be noted that these particular creative decisions
extremely aided the financial spike in this project, as people saw this as something truly
inspiring. Something that could truly become beautiful art- which a lot of people would have
the opinion of now.

“I worked in commercials for years as an illustrator and storyboard artist, I learned about
pitching to how to present a clear message to an audience, so you look like you know exactly
what you’re doing- even if you don’t” Preston, A. ‘From Kickstarter to Release’. Personal
communication, 2017. Alx Preston details three reasons as to why his Kickstarter was so
successful, the first being a simple and exciting pitch. By making his idea easy to understand
and direct to the point. He kept engagement whilst maintaining a level of hype around his idea,
something that is key to all pitches.
Another reason as to why his Kickstarter was so successful was that he already had a great
level of connections and networking for himself within the indie game creator community. A
programmer he had up until 9 months of release was very well known for their game ‘Samurai
Gun’ and from that- had many friends in the relevant industry, helping to promote the project
to a great level. Preston also helped co-found a space for indie developers titled ‘Glitch City’
which also aided in getting his name and his project out into the relevant audience.

The final reason was that he was in the right place at the right time, within the second half of
2013, Hyper Light Drifter was being promoted on Kickstarter alongside 2 very high profile
projects of a similar variety. Which helped build traffic and traction towards their project, as
the general excitement around projects just like this was already strong. To go alongside this,
game articles and press were at their peak of covering Kickstarter projects- meaning Hyper
Light Drifter was talked about a great deal. Whereas soon after the release to current day, this
is something unlikely to happen due to the scale of upcoming indie games following the
success stories of Preston and more.

In terms of keeping the audience that ‘Heart Machine’ had generated through all of these
means, they had to be consistent and proactive with everything that they did. The technique of
this way of thinking was very simple, being daily updates. These updates didn’t really even
have to be relevant, they just had to be relentless. No matter the time of day, the way they
were feeling, their audience needed to be constantly reassured that their money was invested
in people who are tirelessly working and maintaining the dream of creating something great.
Related to this, there were also floods and floods of messages pouring in from across all their
backers. They wanted to keep it so that all questions, messages of support, etc were in fact
recognised and or answered to a decent level of detail. This was a technique that kept their
reputation as very grounded and true to who they are- rather than a cold corporation you’ll
never hear from.

To conclude, Hyper Light Drifter’s success presents crowdfunding as an effective tool to

independent creators because of the large amount of audience it gained off the site
‘Kickstarter’ alone. Not only was this audience huge and rapaciously growing but they offered
a budget with no limitations. There was no contract or investments made, no money expected
back. Just money being spent to help create art. There’s most definitely an argument to be
made that, yes crowdfunding sites take a decent portion of the money, however in Hyper Light
Drifter’s case this was only 9.5% of the original backed figure. Although, it is unknown how
much was spent within the reward system for the backers, which Alx Preston claims was a
large sum. But there’s just no comparison. No matter how much you originally lose out on, at
the end of the day, you have an audience willing to give you significant amounts of money.
Which for a creator, is not only heavily valued- but essential to create a living from.