Wearable tech: also hot in the Galaxy of Trian.
The slowdown in gaming Kickstarters that we could all sense in the air has been empiricized by some data collected by games industry consultants ICO Partners. The big crowdfunding gold rush of 2012/13 that spawned Banner Saga and El Alamein is no more: the overall take for video game campaigns this year is on track to be a little less than half of what it was the year before.
We’re still seeing successes of course, but it’s niche stuff like Yardmaster rather than big commercial projects, but I’m cool with that. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the 0.001% of video game consumers that spends time reading about games — I think that makes us niche. But clearly, Kickstarter projects for games will look different next year: less frequent, smaller dollar amounts.
After the jump, we catch up with the Trese Brothers’ Star Traders 2 campaign and look in on some new ones.
Los Hermanos Trese kicked their campaign for Star Traders 2 off the last time we did a Crowdfunder about a month ago. They’ve hit their mark, and there’s 11 hours to go to hit the first stretch goal for their open world Freelancer-style 2D RPG. For a completely unsurprising full disclosure they’ve got my money in there. These guys are the scrappy young indie devs that the ideal Kickstarter is all about.
This is a Kickstarter that has been and gone already, but I wanted to mention it because it looks fantastic. I’ve seen Galaxy of Trian described as sci-fi Carcassonne (which is a good pitch already) but it’s got a bunch of neat interactions that add more dynamism to that tried-and-true formula. This one is going cardboard first, but one of the campaign stretch goals was iOS and Android editions and they hit that. I’ve pinged the devs to hear more about their plans and I’ll let you know when they come back to me.
Eminence: Xander’s Tales has a name that might have been spat out of a random number generator, but it’s an RPG with a trading card game baked in that borrows from Final Fantasy VIII’s Triple Triad. Neat-o. The character design is just a bit too kawaii for my tastes but I love the card art.
This pitch needs ten grand in the next four days, and it’s planned for iOS, Android, and (snort) Ouya. It’s a free-to-play game, unfortunately.
Checking in on other campaigns from last month…
Modular digital RPG set Game Master didn’t make it (as we suspected it wouldn’t) and the devs cancelled early once the writing was on the wall. The “Weird West”-set squad tactical game Hard West hit their goal with cash to spare, though this one isn’t guaranteed for tablets. Boss Monster smashed its goal of $85K with nearly double that figure, which ensures that this tabletop game will be coming to mobile next year if all goes well.
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