That seems to be a big difference to me. I wonder if this is more like SeedInvest than KickStarter, but more people understand the Kickstarter model. I can't look now, because I'm getting a "site can't be reached" error.

Kickstarter asks the community to shoulder the risk of development -- you put your money in, with explicitly no guarantee that you'll get a game out of it (just a guarantee of a good-faith effort to put the game out), much less a good game.

As much as the big publisher model trends towards games that feel somewhat alike and tend to chase trends, it moves the burden of risk onto an entity that's designed to assume that risk.

Unless I'm missing something, Fig's model also asks the community to shoulder the risk. The only substantial difference is that with the Fig model the community also shares in all of the potential upside, whereas Kickstarter offloads the risk, but caps the maximum upside at getting the game you backed.

To be clear, fig also provides the Kickstarter model alongside its investor model. So you don't have to choose one platform over the other in terms of how you want to risk your money.

For potential backers, it seems that Fig is much more curated? KS allows literally just anybody to create a campaign, but I'm assuming from the limited selection of open investments that Fig has a threshold of viability.

By and large, it's pretty easy on KS to see when a campaign is created by known developers/publishers. But there's still plenty of noise and anomalies, like this "Day of Dragons" which seemed to raise half a mil based on coincidental timing: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-10-11-harry-potter-a...

It's nice to have several competing services (this way we might avoid situations where developers loose all access to funding if they are dropped by monopolist like Patreon).

And Fig seems to be way more specialized, since it also offers to act as a publishing.