Eternal Grace, the first crowdfunded game project on Wujudkan failed to be funded. Up unitl the deadline of 9 August the game only received Rp 6 million out of the Rp 50 million required to launch the project.
This failure adds to the long list of projects that had failed to be funded through Wujudkan. To date, there’s only been two projects that had been successfully funded on the site. The first being “Papan Untuk Semua: Atap Untuk Rumah Uay” a housing project to assist the less fortunate, and the second being “Atambua 360ºC”, a movie by Mira Lesmana. Mira Lesmana’s movie project played a significant role in getting crowdfunding to be widely noticed, having collected Rp 300 million. This project alone even pushed Wujudkan to be at the top of the list among Asian crowdfunding sites according to SGEntrepreneurs.
Jason Prestiliano, project leader for Eternal Grace admitted to Kompas Tekno that the failure of the project’s funding is more to the fact that most consumers have yet to recognize the idealism that they offer. They wanted to show that Indonesia can create an RPG game that highlights certain Indonesian traits and is comparable to games from the larger developers. Unfortunately the demand for games from major developers still outshine the drive by local developers.
While overseas, two major crowdfunded projects (Ouya and app.net) have been making the news in the past few weeks, the future of crowdfunding in Indonesia still faces a significant question mark. The rate of unfunded projects compared to funded ones is still heavily skewed towards the former.
It seems that the Indonesian consumers have yet to accept crowdfunding scheme especially those with commercial aims.The lack of clear rewards for them may be a factor in their reluctance in funding such a project. Looks like future crowdfunding projects must be able to deliver the right motivations and rewards for consumers to entice them to contribute.
Right now, there are several projects running on Wujudkan and Patungan. Let’s wait for more breakthroughs from crowdfunding site owners and project owners so that crowdfunding can become more familiar to the consumers and be a significant driver of Indonesia’s creative projects.
