Scoreboard time! Ouya has raised another $400k+ in the past week and is now at $5.6 million with 12 days left. The Penny Arcade kickstarter has raised $35k in the past week and is now at $378k with 18 days left. The Defense Grid kickstarter has raised another $30k and is up to $162k (goal of $250k) with 17 days left. 3D Dictionary finished up with $28k ($12k goal). Shadowrun Online is up to $178k ($500k goal) with 17 days left. Spacechem is up to $5k+ with 66 hours left. And the Ninostarter still hasn’t reached its first goal.
It’s not really my thing, but the kickstarter for Castle Story is noteworthy for how quickly it has raised money (without having the advantage of being a sequel to a well-beloved classic game) – it’s up to $146k ($80k goal) and it only just went up. It appears to be a mix of RTS & Minecraft so it’s not that surprising that it’s seeing success.
Detective Grimoire looks to be a fun point & click adventure game. It’s at $16k ($25k goal) with only 5 days left so hopefully they’ll see a last minute surge of support.
Volgarr the Viking looks promising – it’s a retro 2D action game created by people who were responsible for some quality Action/Adventure portable games including Spyro: The Eternal Night and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. They’re up to $14k ($18k goal). Their highest reward tier is especially ambitious – for $7,500 you get a fully functional arcade machine of the game.
To finish things off, here’s an interesting interview of Chris Avellone where he talks about the challenges of Kickstarter and the possibility of using it to do more games like Planescape: Torment.
Oh and just to let everyone know in advance – I’m going to be out of town all next week visiting family so the next installment of the Video Game Kickstart Report will be in 2 weeks.
I think part of the success of Castle Story is also because their initial video got quite popular, and they have been talking about it for months, posting weekly development updates, and keeping people engages. They also had a countdown for the launch of the Kickstarter itself, so everyone who already knew about the game and wanted it knew just when it launched.