Back in January I posted about the Pillars of Eternity 2 funding campaign on Fig, which ultimately ended up at 400% of its requested funding. Along with asking for money straight up, Fig also allows you to buy shares at $1,000 a pop. The more the game sells, the more you get in return, including hopefully more than the original amount you put in.
The time finally came to buy those shares, and I did just that. As I said in the original post, PoE2 just has to sell as well as PoE1 to make the investment worthwhile, and I’d be shocked if that wasn’t the case. But this is really less about the money (short of PoE2 being a blockbuster, the ROI here isn’t going to be anything amazing), and more about experiencing something new in gaming.
For the first time (well, second if you want to count the millions I made from pimping Darkfall back in the day), I’m not only rooting for a game to succeed because I like the genre and want to see more games like this, I’m now also rooting for it for personal gain, and (I think?) I’ll have a better view into how well the game actually sells and at what price points. That should be interesting and worth the upfront investment risk.
And yes, there is something comical about investing money to hopefully make money, while at the same time basically using money for entertainment (the sales data and the whole experience) around gaming, without the spending of money being on actually playing a game. Welcome to the future I guess!
Hardcore Casual 
So, here’s the thing, and the reason I haven’t bought shares in any Fig games thus far: Their sales requirements specifically exclude sales from the crowdfunding itself.
So they’ll need to hit those sales numbers on those charts they present AFTER you subtract everyone who’s participated in the Fig funding. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t think that’ll be hard to do in this case, but it’s kinda shitty of them to bury that detail in the financial disclosures and not be very up-front about it.
Best of luck with your investment! Excited to hear from someone who’s finally made the jump.
I saw that, but right now the Fig only has 33.6k backers, which is a good number of backers, but is a very low number for boxes sold, so not counting the 33.6k towards the total sales amount (hopefully north of 1m) shouldn’t be a huge deal.
As someone who’s been an Activision Blizzard shareholder since WotLK, I can attest that making money hand over fist from betting on videogames one likes is not a new thing. :)
That investment initially was looking shaky for a bit :) Turned out decent recently though yea.