Crowd-sourced fundraising service Kickstarter has received a lot of attention from the video game world of late, after the huge success of a pair of notable game projects: Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2.
Both those games managed to earn huge amounts of money through the goodwill of gamers: Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 both pulled down more than $3 million for their campaigns, well over what they originally asked for from their backers. Those two success stories have spawned a huge number of new game projects on Kickstarter, with lots of developers hoping to slice off a piece of others’ successes to make the dream projects of their own.
One such project is République, a story-driven stealth game, notable because of its ambition. As PocketGamer reports, the title intends to push the envelope of mobile gaming in terms of graphics, and is also going to be available on PC and Mac as well as Android and iPhone. Camouflaj, the developer behind the game, says that in order to create a game of the caliber of what it has planned for Répulique, it’s going to need money – a lot of money.
République’s Kickstarter asked backers to contribute money toward a goal of $500,000, and with less than three days remaining in the campaign, that goal is far from met: about $200,000 shy, in fact. The way Kickstarter works, a project has to hit its stated fundraising goal before any of the money is collected from pledges submitted by backers. So if Camouflaj can’t get together another $200,000, it won’t receive the other $300,000 that users have already promised to give.
Former Halo developer Ryan Payton, who founded Camouflaj, maintains that the studio did the right thing in asking for the amount of money it thought it needed to make the game it wanted to make. Payton said Camouflaj worries about losing creative control of the game if it has to go through traditional channels to get funding, like involving a publisher.
The reality is that games of the scope of what Camouflaj hopes to make are expensive, Payton told PocketGamer.
“The truth of the matter is that, in terms of game budgets, République is an absolute bargain,” he said.
“I know that people in the community have really struggled with the notion that this game will cost over a million dollars to make, but the reality is that it would cost at least five times that to produce this at established companies like EA, Sega, Activision.”
The fact remains, however, that République has a lot of money still to earn and not a lot of time left to earn it. With time running out, Camouflaj hasn’t got long to convince players that its game is something they’ll want to play on their iPhones and iPads. You can check out République’s Kickstarter campaign right here.
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