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The rise in the number of crowdfunding skeptics hasn’t stopped fans from parting with cash to the tune of $178,000 to help the designer of Final Fantasy Tactics bring his latest game, Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians, to PC.
Yasumi Matsuno is also famous for Tactics Ogre and Vagrant Story, and his latest creation was already set to arrive on iOS and Android.
If the Kickstarter campaign reaches its $600,000 goal, Unsung Story will be sung on Mac and Windows PCs as well as Windows tablets, “fully developed for agnostic platform play.”
The project’s stretch goals mostly focus on adding new content and getting other respected developers on board, but at the rather ambitious stretch goal levels of $1.8m and $2.8m, the developers at Playdek will add support for PlayStation Vita and Nintendo 3DS ports respectively.
Other funding goals could see the addition of Matsuno collaborators Hitoshi Sakimoto on music and writer/translator Alexander Smith.
It’s an interesting coincidence (or not) that the campaign – less than 24 hours old – launched on the day that the first part of Double Fine’s Broken Age arrived with backers, almost two years after it Kickstarted the industry’s interest in crowdfunding.
Since then industry members and fans alike have become more skeptical of the platform that some once claimed would shake traditional publishers to the core, but despite claims that crowdfunding is mostly scams, amateurs, and old-timers having a tryst with nostalgia, Unsung Story is drawing an awful lot of enthusiasm.
This is perhaps surprising considering the fact that it’s not a game that can’t be made without crowdfunding, and it’s certainly guilty of milking nostalgia.
What’s telling is that fans are evidently willing to pay in advance to see a game released on their favourite platform rather than waiting for months after launch for a port.
