The Video Game Kickstarter Report – Week of October 12

Project Eternity – $2.7 million with 4 days left.
Sealark, an Oceanic Adventure Game – $47k. 2 days left.
Blackspace – $121k ($350k goal). 5 days left.
An Old-School RPG – $230k. 23 days left.
FFVI OC Remix Soundtrack – $107k. 13 days left.
Doug TenNapal Sketchbook – $69k. 9 days left.
Songmasters, the Music Wars – $9k. 51 days left.
Mindblown Life –  $44k ($60k goal). 20 days left.

I had trouble finding projects on kickstarter that I thought looked interesting this week but here’s one – Dysis. It’s a voxel-based RTS game where you can also switch to FPS mode to control your units directly. Has a nice appealing art style (despite its overuse since Minecraft, I really like the voxel look) and it looks like it could be a really fun game when it’s done. Oh and if you donate $10k, the creator will make you your own personalized real life robot (he makes them in his spare time). It’s up to $12k ($10k goal) with 22 days left.

Most of the big crowdfunding games this week aren’t actually on kickstarter. First up is Star Citizen – an ambitious massively multiplayer online spaceship game from Chris Roberts, the creator of Wing Commander. There’s no public way of viewing how it’s doing but according to the creator, it’s raised nearly $500k from 4,000 backers (meaning the average backing amount is $125). Although it looks promising, I’d recommend caution – the release date is 2 years away and the creator has already admitted that the crowdfunding aspect of the project is primarily meant to attract more serious investors – the project will supposedly cost 12-14 million dollars to create but I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual amount is even larger.

Another big crowdfunding project that isn’t on kickstarter is Prison Architect. It’s a management sim where you, uh, run your own prison. Wait! Come back! It’s made by Introversion which has a reputation for making weird & well done games (like Darwinia & Defcon 5). It’s doing very well and has raised over $270k in 2 weeks.

That’s two big crowdfunding projects that are seeing massive success outside of kickstarter. Will we continue to see more and more projects skip kickstarter all together and run their own funding efforts on their own sites? On the one hand, if you do your own project, you don’t have to abide by kickstarter’s rules or pay them a cut. On the other hand, kickstarter is still the best known of all the crowdfunding sites & they handle a lot of the administrative overhead for running a crowdfunding campaign for you.