Crowdfunding site's strict rules mean game over for Dream Quest games
Dream Quest games has failed to meet its $50,000 Kickstarter goal by a mere $28.
The rules for the biggest crowdfunding site are necessarily strict, and Kickstarter is set apart by its "all-or-nothing" funding policy the only pays out if the target goal is met.
This also means that developers don't owe Kickstarter any cash, and backers aren't charged for their promised contribution.
Other crowdfunding sites offer different funding schemes, but none of them offer the visibility and traffic that the more established Kickstarter affords.
"Obviously, we are very disappointed," said an official Alpha Colony Facebook entry.
Advertisement
"We have invested 10 months and over $60,000 of our own money into this project. It is so frustrating to come so close, but clearly there simply isn't that much interest in building the kind of game I envisioned."
The problem of interest has been growing for developers seeking funding on the crowdfunding platform of late.
While Kostas Zarifis places heavy blame on gamer's "hatred" of motion control for the poor reception to Kung-Fu superstar, he has also pointed out that Kickstarter backers seem more interested in nostalgia than innovation.
He has a point.
Alpha Colony isn't exactly cutting-edge, but as an attempt at family friendly gaming it might have expected to see support of a new generation of tech-savvy parents.
Johan Sebastian Joust has been one of the most talked about indie games of the past few years, but the "Sportsfriends" Kickstarter has been suprisingly slow to make progress.
As fans grow weary and more skeptical of Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general, there may also be a greater hesitation to back projects from developers who are trying something risky.
If that's not irony, it's the darkest form of coincidence imaginable.
I don't think there's any irony in a game that was deemed too risky for traditional publishers also being seen as too risky by the public. The whole point of Kickstarter, as I see it, is to get funding from your target market instead of going through the traditional capital-raising process. All that's suggested by Alpha Colony's failure to meet its target is that the market for that game actually WASN'T big enough to justify its budget.
Of course, a casual/family game like this has a particular hurdle to get over that other, more "hardcore" (or nostalgia-driven) projects don't have, and that's the payoff for backers. Sure, if Alpha Colony had succeeded it might've been a runaway success, but while a traditional investor would have seen some reward for their risk, as a Kickstarter backer I might only have gotten a copy of the game - which, for all its profitability, I don't really want to play.
Kickstarter projects will only be backed by people who have a personal interest in the final product; maybe the audience on Kickstarter just isn't the target market for a game like Alpha Colony.
Please. If they really believed in their project they could push those $28.
For me it's clear that they didn't had enough with 50 thousand and didn't want to push it.
Well. No risk, no gain... and more importantly nobody looses anything.
I love kickstarter!
If they believed in their project then someone, anyone related to the project could easily have put ~$28 forward to reach their goal within the last couple of minutes of the funding.
Good lord you could have got a ralative to pop that $28 in for you heck if you had got on twitter & told us you were that close someone would of jumped on & put the $28 up (I would have) It's $28 guys if your on kickstarter & your close but times running out get the word out or ask someone to pop you over the line.
To be honest, they were on a losing streak to begin with.
The game was an out and out rip off of M.U.L.E. and there's a perfectly good version of that available for pretty much every system ever released since the Commodore 64, there's even a free online one for PC.
