Hearing a Palestinian indie dev explain how not even "choose your country" is available on some crowd funding websites - Dreams on a Pillow interview
I sat down with my friend Rasheed, a Palestinian game developer, to talk about his upcoming title, Dreams on a Pillow: It’s a heavy psychological/historical piece that follows a mother during the 1948 Nakba who accidentally flees her village holding a pillow instead of her baby. She ends up suffering from severe trauma and PTSD, genuinely believing the pillow is her child.
He mentions that he approached roughly 300 publishers. Many praised the game privately as incredible, but corporate policy wouldn't let them back a Palestinian title
When he tried to crowdfund, he realized Palestine literally isn't an option in the country selection menus for Kickstarter or Indiegogo. He couldn't even register a campaign. Because the standard gaming platforms blocked him, he had to take his game to LaunchGood. It’s a platform entirely built for humanitarian. He had to pitch a psychological indie game next to global relief campaigns just to find a platform that would let him exist....
Even with the system treating him as invisible, he still was able to raised 200k for pre-production phase of the development which is impressive!
I really enjoyed him sharing his philosophy on game design. He told me: *“If you abstract everything, games look very silly. Press a button... and something happened on the screen. But the real game is happening in the head of the player.”*To him, it's less about building software and more about managing human emotion.
If you want a look at a completely different side of the industry grind, the convo might be interesting.