Camelot Unchained Kickstarter Campaign Complete May 2, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter, Lord British, Mark Jacobs, Shroud of the Avatar
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The 30 day run is over and Mark Jacobs and team have made their goal and then some. The final count on Kickstarter is $2,232,933.
NOT the official drink of Kickstarter
As I pointed out as part of the Kickstarter pattern, the campaign hauled in about as much in the last two days of the run as they did during the first big day. More people showed up for a last minute contribution. You can see how that played out with this chart over at Kicktraq.
Or you can just go with this.
In a word: DING!—
Camelot Unchained (@UnchainedKS) May 02, 2013
Plus, once they met their $2 million goal, they were able to open up PayPal donations as well, which accrued nearly another $30K up to this point and which will no doubt remain open for those who want in on the founder deals.
And on top of all of that, there is the additional million dollars from other investors and the $2 million dollars that Mark Jacobs is personally kicking in, giving City State Entertainment more than $5 million to create its niche, RvR, no-PvE focused MMORPG.
So now it is time for them to go build a game.
And, as usual, I cannot help but compare how this campaign went with how Lord British and his Shroud of the Avatar Kickstart finished. While the two games are different in substance as planned, they were both what I would call personality driven campaigns, Lord British on one hand and Mark Jacobs on the other, around proposed fantasy games that hearkened back to their roots as designers and which were both squarely aimed and their long term fans.
Lord British had a more modest goal, one million dollars, and ended up just past the two million dollar mark at the end. Mark Jacobs set a more aggressive goal, one that was in question with only three days left in the campaign, but which ended up just shy of 2.3 million dollars. (PayPal contributions as they stood at campaign end included for both.)
Lord British brought in more backers, with 22,322 pitching in on Kickstarter, compared to 14,873 for CU. But the average pledge per backer was $151 for CU, while Lord British fans gave an average of $86.
Over at Kicktraq you can look at the Shroud of the Avatar and Camelot Unchained numbers to see how things shaped up in each campaign.
Both campaigns were examples of how is being viewed by larger projects. Rather than being a primary source of funding, these were marketing campaigns that raised awareness, identified a core audience, got data and buy-in from them, and made a pile of money in the process. How else can a company do that before they have actually made a serious start on a game?
And success in Kickstarter, and delivering on promises, can make a difference in funding. I got a note… well, it was really a link to a video… last week from Hidden Path Entertainment that they got funding to go ahead with Defense Grid 2, largely based on their Kickstarter performance. So it can make a difference. And I’ll get a copy of that when it comes out for free, having been a supporter.
There are still plenty of small campaigns out there for projects that could otherwise not find funding along with fundraising efforts and the like. Jason Scott wasn’t going to get funding any other way for his documentaries (or his storage unit), and Planet Money, a podcast I enjoy, is doing a T-shirt fundraiser on Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is just becoming more things to more people as time goes on and people get used to it.
Anyway, now comes the long wait for the games that were funded. But at least I will likely shut up about Kickstarter for a while.
2 Million in the Bag – Camelot Unchained Makes Its Goal May 1, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter
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Mark Jacobs is a happy man right now, as the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter campaign managed to climb the mountain, covering nearly $400K of funding in the last two days despite a multi-hour Amazon payments outage and some issues with over-zealous supporters.
The count at ~20:09 UTC
I hope you didn’t pledge a lot of money hoping nobody would call your bluff. The time to pony up is nigh!
Anyway, with 19 hours left to go, we shall see how much more money they can collect.
And then, of course, they have to actually make all that stuff they have been telling us about for the last 29 days.
Cry “Funded!” and let slip the dogs of unrealistic expectations!
Addendum: Oh, yeah, stretch goals. I bet they have had this graphic ready for a while.
What do we get for going over?
I am not sure what they really mean to me… what else is new… but there they are.
Camelot Unchained – 3 Days and $400K To Go April 29, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter
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Okay, maybe a little less than $400K, but the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter campaign is coming down to the wire.
Morning of April 29
It could happen. In looking at the records of similar campaigns on the various sites that track them, projects can pick up as many pledges in the last two days as they did on the opening day. Camelot Unchained had a $550K opening day. You can see a pledges and backers by day chart here. So it is well within the realm of possibility.
I wonder, in a general Kickstarter campaign way, how certain aspects of the way things have been done have helped or hurt them. Mark Jacobs has been very forthright about the niche appeal of the game, and certainly the “No PvE content” aspect is sending some people away. But that is to be expected.
Other things though, like tiers that allow limited backers, do not appear to have been used… well? correctly? efficiently? To my mind, that is supposed to create a sense of artificial scarcity to get people to pledge right away.
The first four limited tiers ($25, $50, $55, $110) have a combined total of 25,000 “limited” slots, which is roughly 2.5 times the total number of backers up to this point. If your limited tiers are still open and available with only three days left to go on the campaign, I have to think they are not working as designed.
The tier price points also seem to be a bit confusing. In past campaigns, there has been a pattern of regular price points ($25, $50, $75, $100) which are often the limited tiers, and then a slightly more expensive unlimited tier above each that gives just a little bit less than the limited tier, to encourage people to pledge right away.
Instead, it is a bit of a muddle. Why would you have competing $50 and $55 limited tiers, for example? Why nothing at the magic price point of $100? I know $110 is just a bit more, but in my experience, $$100 is often a mental threshold.
And then there is what you get for each tier, which I find to be unnecessarily complex. The $50 and $55 price points mentioned above differ on so few points as to make me wonder why you would make them two separate tiers.
Ah well, brighter minds than my own no doubt have a narrative to explain the complexity. And they certainly did well selling the higher level tiers. Of the 75 pledge slots at $2,500 and above, only 6 are still available.
And it is too late to change any of that in any case. The next three days will tell the tale.
Quick, Somebody Go Pledge Sixty Dollars April 19, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter
7 comments
Checking the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter tonight and the numbers were almost in sequence.
~02:10 UTC
Somewhere, some OCD person is going nuts.
Update: Somebody… or two somebodies… couldn’t take the pressure.
~02:25 UTC
Now, will this perfect number kill off all future pledges?
Camelot Unchained Newsletter #3 – Are You On The Fence? April 17, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter, Mark Jacobs, Mark Sumner
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Mark’s getting serious.
The Camelot Unchained Kickstarter campaign is at the halfway point today, with 15 of 30 days having passed. The campaign is sitting at the $1.2 million mark, which means that it has picked up an additional $200K since it hit the million dollar point a week ago. At that rate of funding, the project needs another four weeks, and it only has two.
Last night the third Camelot Unchained newsletter went out to those of us who signed up for the mailing list. It opened with a personal appeal from Mark Jacobs.
We knew that our Kickstarter campaign wasn’t going to be an easy sell. We are asking for $2M which isn’t the largest Kickstarter ask but it is still very significant. Even though I am putting up $2M of my own money (and an additional $1M from investors) to fund completion, we know that many of you are still nervous about committing.
If you are among those who are waiting to see if we get closer to funding before committing to our Kickstarter, I have to ask you why?
Kickstarter, unlike PayPal, doesn’t charge your credit card until the project funds. Thus, you can back us without worrying about being charged for a project that doesn’t fund. This is why we can’t use PayPal until after Camelot Unchained funds.
Also, by pledging now you help us as we pass through the Kickstarter doldrums that very often happen in the middle of a project. I’m hesitant to use any gimmicks (“Pledge now and receive a pony!”) but I will simply say this, if you believe in what you’ve seen so far from Camelot Unchained and have not currently pledged, it’s time to show your support. Doing so costs you nothing and in the meantime, it may help encourage other people to pledge as well.
If everyone who signed up for our newsletter pledged now we would be a lot closer to making our goal. So please, if you like what you’ve seen and heard from myself and CSE, now’s the time for getting off that fence before it leaves a permanent mark!
That text is unchanged by myself except for fixing “smart” quotes that did not copy/paste correctly (those are Microsoft’s curse on the world in my opinion) and inserting line breaks to make the text more readable. (That is where my mind inserted line breaks when reading it, which probably says more about how I think that what was written.)
And the message is, essentially, “don’t wait.” Certainly a last minute push to the final goal is more likely, and more likely to be successful, the closer to the actual goal the campaign is. And that last minute push can be important. Look at how much the last day or so brought in for Shroud of the Avatar.
This was followed up by a reminder about The Depths, the plan for an RvR dungeon in Camelot Unchained.
Depths of Camelot Unchained
The Depths was discussed in a video update where it was described as a “stretch goal.”
I am not sure that going from a message about trying to make it to an ambitious base goal to a discussion of a stretch goal, which assumes funding above and beyond the asked for amount, is really the best one-two marketing punch. But it is possible I am missing something there.
The newsletter then launches into an interview with author, former Dark Age of Camelot player, member of the Stellar Emperor fraternity, and Camelot Unchained backer Mark Sumner, who, according to the interview, learned about the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter from “the spiffy blog of the Ancient Gaming Noob.”
Hi Mark!
Then the newsletter closes with a thank you for people who have supported the project and a final statement about the future.
…I look forward to the day that we are not talking about pledges, backing, etc. but rather how together we can make Camelot Unchained the game that many of us have been waiting so long for, an RvR-focused MMORPG that is willing to take chances, break rules in order to dare to be great.
So here we sit, with 15 days left to go, the funding about 60% complete, and probably all the easy dollars pledged at this point. There are no more islands or inns available. (25 people pledged $5,000 a piece for those.) So a lot of people need to show up and buy in to make this happen.
Camelot Unchained and the Mark Jacobs Interview April 13, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter, Mark Jacobs
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As I wrote about the Lord British “most game designers really just suck” interview, there seems to come a point in Kickstarter campaigns where pledges start to slow down, where all the likely suspects are on board, and now the whole things needs a spark to get more attention.
One way to get attention is to give an interview with some juicy quotes that will generate some mild controversy.
So Lord British happily and knowingly pissed all over a bunch of people in the games industry in pursuit of that attention. That he came back and rather unconvincingly claimed he was taken out of context was a clear indication that he went too far for that goal.
When I posted about the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter launching, I asked, in more of a poke at Lord British than in a serious expectation that it would occur, if we were going to an interview from Mark Jacobs where he insulted people. He was kind enough to post a comment here that such behavior was not his style. But I still wondered if an interview with a good, headline generating quote might not be in the offing for that time when the momentum started to slack.
Well, the time seems to have arrived. After hitting the halfway point, the million dollar mark if you will, earlier this week, there has been a noticeable tapering off of pledges. Time to stir the pot. Time for Mark Jacobs to speak to the press.
And what headline we get?
Free-to-Play Headed Towards an “Apocalypse” in 3-5 Years Time
That was the money quote from an interview over at VG24/7.
Certainly that was a good quote. It implies a disaster for what has become the MMO industry’s dominant business model.
And the interview certainly goes into some things that have been covered before. The days of free-to-play being a differentiator are gone. The first blush success of DDO and LOTRO going to the model has been replaced by the need to constantly escalate the pitch to get people to buy things from the cash shop.
And by saying that Camelot Unchained wants to focus on the people willing to put up the money to subscribe, he brings up by implication one of the more annoying bits about free-to-play.
Free-to-play games also focus on those willing to put up money… but that is usually through the inevitable cash shop. And so games on that model have to keep coming up with the next big thing to push, and it becomes harder and harder not to just sell game impacting power.
As for the apocalypse of the quote, I think we are already on the cusp. Games following that business model are already folding up, some before they even launch in North America and Europe. It is no longer good enough just to be free-to-play.
What I think we will see in 3-5 years is an actual good understanding of what it takes to make a successful free-to-play game. Knocking off WoW and bolting on a cash shop will no longer cut it. We will understand when somebody says “free-to-play” what it really means, or at least what various flavors of the business model mean.
As for the purpose of the interview, bringing attention to the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter, do you think this is going to be enough? Two million dollars is still a long march away.
Camelot Unchained: Mark Makes a Million April 10, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Kickstarter, Mark Jacobs
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I was just peeking in to see how the Camelot Unchained Kickstarted campaign was doing when the screen updated from $996K to one million dollars. Mark Jacobs is no doubt a happy man at the moment.
April 10, ~00:20 UTC
That puts the campaign at the half way point just eight days in, which was a bit faster than Shroud of the Avatar made it to the million dollar mark.
The big difference is that Lord British had made his goal at that point. There is still a long climb to go here.
Then again, Shroud of the Avatar pulled in a nice chunk of change at the last minute, pushing it past the two million mark.
So we shall see.
In the mean time, Mark spent his last update answering yet more questions.
Shroud of the Avatar Comes in Just Over Two Million Dollars April 7, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment.Tags: Camelot Unchained, Kickstarter, Lord British, Mark Jacobs, Shroud of the Avatar
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Lord British is no doubt celebrating this morning, having finished up his 30 day run on Kickstarter with a last minute surge of donations, bringing the grand total of donations to $2,030,676, averaging about $88 per backer. That is double is initial $1 million goal.
NOT the official drink of Kickstarter
That number includes the totals from the Kickstarter page and money raised on the official game site from those who wanted to use PayPal.
From the official site
I am not sure why somebody would find Amazon payments objectionable, but then be fine with PayPal, but I guess at least 775 people could answer that question, and they have 111,401 reasons on their side.
Anyway, this means that the $2 million stretch goal has been met.
That is a long list
And, as these things now go, just because it is over doesn’t mean it is actually over. Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity Kickstarter funded, but then let people put in some money late with their “slack backer” program on their official site. so you can get in on some aspect of the action on a Kickstarter than funded back in October.
I have also seen several Kickstarter campaigns that let you upgrade your tier after the fact, raking in a few extra dollars. And, even as I am writing this, people have added more money to the Shroud of the Avatar project via PayPal. But I have updated the dollar amount above three times already. I am just going to leave it where it is for now.
And speaking of now, now is when the wait begins. The money is being collected. The goals are set.
When will something come of all of this?
One of the more common complaints about Kickstarter is about projects not meeting their timeline. The estimated date for the launch of the first of five episodes of the game is October 2014. I guess we will see in about 18 months how accurate that estimate was along with how much communication continues from Lord British and company post-campaign. Communication can alleviate some of the frustration people will feel when the project inevitably slips.
And, most important of all, with the unwieldy name of Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, can we just shorten that to “SotA” and pronounce is as “soda?”
Meanwhile, the Camelot Unchained Kickstarted campaign is five days in and just shy of the $900K mark on the path to the $2 million goal as I write this. It is bringing in an average of $157 per back at this point, but appears to have hit that first plateau after a very quick initial run up. We will have to see what Mark Jacobs and team has up their sleeve to keep that dollar amount climbing.
Camelot Unchained Kickstarter Unleashed! April 2, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Camelot Unchained, entertainment.Tags: Camelot Unchained, Kickstarter, Lord British, Mark Jacobs, Shroud of the Avatar
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Mark Jacobs and his team were wise enough to pass on an April 1st start date for his Camelot Unchained Kickstarter.
(Though I think the whole thing started before the timer on the Camelot Unchained home page finished counting down. Probably a good idea to make sure it was going strong before sending people over.)
But the day of fools has passed, and now it is back to marketing as usual.
As Lord British and his Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter winds down its last few days, having crossed the $1.3 million mark, getting it to the interactive musical instruments stretch goal (did anybody believe that those stretch goals wouldn’t make it into the game?), Mark Jacobs and Camelot Unchained begin their campaign.
And Mark wants two million dollars.
He’ll see Lord British’s million and raise him a million.
That seems like an aggressive goal. As I said before, I think Lord British has better general name recognition and is a bigger draw because of that. So the City State Entertainment team is going to have to work hard to make that goal.
All of the now standard Kickstarter bits and pieces are in place. There are tiers from $5 to $10,000 with splashy graphics to illustrate what you get with each tier and charts to compare tier. It is a lot of graphics. The page seems to go on forever. But you pretty much need the picture to see what you are getting because the text about the tiers in the side bar is cramped and goes on forever as well. And I have already spotted a couple of discrepancies between charts and pictures. There is a game in that alone I think.
There are mission statements and what makes the game unique and, of course, the requisite “why Kickstarter” apologia.
As a “niche” and RvR-focused MMORPG, CU is a very risky venture for most traditional game publishers. Even if we did find one willing to take the risk, it would come with so many strings attached we couldn’t make the game we want to, or would face constant battling to ensure our vision remains intact. That’s why we’re attempting to fund some, but not all, of this project’s costs through Kickstarter.
While we at CSE believe in Camelot Unchained, we could be wrong about it having even enough appeal for backers to fund this Kickstarter. We will create this game only if there is a demand for it, so if we can’t get the partial funding we seek, we will not go ahead. OTOH, if we do successfully fund, Mark Jacobs will add $2M dollars to the development budget himself. This is covered in more detail below.
I suppose it is refreshing to see the founder, who in this case doesn’t live in a castle and hasn’t paid his way into space, publicly matching the funds raised. I am not sure how meaningful that is, but it is there.
And there is a succinct statement about where the money is going.
Every dollar we raise from this Kickstarter campaign will go towards development. Our staffing plan includes hiring three additional engineers, two artists, one designer and one part-time writer immediately. The MMO engine will be developed in-house with one purpose, to make a great RvR MMORPG; the engineers will work with Andrew on it, and our existing programmers on the server tech. While this game won’t require the amount of content as Dark Age of Camelot, we still need to hire a few more artists in-house and a writer so, dragons be praised, Mark can go back to his day job and stop writing all these documents.
I think that is a pretty reasonable statement.
There is a chart that lists out what you can buy with those Founder Points you get for this and that. That seems to be a mildly new twist. I am still not sure how many points I would get for any given tier, or how I actually spend them, but at least I can see that there is a use for them.
There are, however, no explicit stretch goals yet, though there are several statement about other platforms depending on making such goals. But I get the feeling it will be a stretch to get to the main goal. And it is easier to communicate a specific goal rather than a series of hurdles past what people thought was the finish line.
And there is a nice new graphic of the team.
City State Entertainment
I like that a lot. And now I am even more likely to think of The City State of the Invincible Overlord every time I see that company name.
I also like that the name of the product is just two words, Camelot Unchained, and didn’t end up as Mark Jacob’s Camelot Unchained: Conflict of Three Lands Who Have Been At It Before or some such.
And the estimated delivery date for the final product? December 2015.
Now, the big question is, will Mark Jacobs and the City State Entertainment team make it to $2,000,000 by Thursday May 2, 11:56am EDT? We’re at the fast out of the gate stage where the true believers kick in, so the numbers are rising fast. The $300K mark is close as of this time. But when will that first plateau arrive?
And will we get an interview from Mark Jacobs where he insults people in order to draw attention to the whole thing when pledges do slow down?
The Kickstarter page is here for your viewing pleasure.
This Kickstarter and That Kickstarter March 29, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment.Tags: Camelot Unchained, Kickstarter, Lord British, Mark Jacobs, Shroud of the Avatar
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Lord British carries on, but his Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter project is coming to its close. There are just nine days left to go at this point. He is past his goal and sitting around the $1.2 million mark.
I have said in previous posts that this Kickstarter project is more of a marketing exercise than a financing necessity. That it is being run to a plan. And that even Lord British giving a controversial interview was part of that plan, though that seemed to go off course a bit.
And while I am sure I sound cynical at times… during waking hours is generally when this is so, though I am told I sometimes snore in derisive tones… I do not see this who process as not necessarily a bad thing.
Not a bad thing at all, really.
Lord British… and since he is putting his name at the top and playing the role as primary spokesperson, I’ll keep referring just to him… has availed himself of a useful publicity tool that brings with it many benefits, not the least of these is that it can turn a profit while getting the word out and getting his real fans to self-identify and invest themselves… emotionally and economically… in his proposed game.
And the plan continues. They hit the checkpoint the other day where they announced additional benefits for each of the different pledge tiers. This was not spontaneous at all. This was a method to get people already on the hook to up their pledge. Who doesn’t want an immortality fruit for just a few dollars more?
Available only to backers, you will receive one Immortality Fruit seed. With the Farming Craft you can plant the Immortality Fruit seed, which will bear a single fruit. When eaten, this fruit will fully heal you, and leave you with a single seed which can be planted and harvested, over and over, for all eternity. The Immortality Fruit seed can be transferred between players.
As far as I can tell, this did manage to shake a few more dollars out of people’s pockets, as I am sure his opening up pledges to PayPal users.
The plan though seemed to be based on a specific tempo. The philosophy behind it appeared to be to make this as much of a spectacle during the 30 days of the project, with minimal information available before the kick off.
Every concrete detail we know about Shroud of the Avatar… including the name… has come since their Kickstarter has launched. It has been a concentration of focus. No warning. Shock and awe, if you will.
And this interests me because not only is another industry veteran, Mark Jacobs, planning a Kickstarter campaign, but he is doing it in a very different way so far. He and his company, City State Entertainment, have been talking about what they are planning for a while now. They started their pre-Kickstarter awareness campaign back at the beginning of February.
We know the name already. Or at least we think we do. It is Camelot Unchained, with a faint “working title” scribbled in along side.
Mark Jacobs has laid out a series of design principles around the game cover things such as balance, crafting, socializing, and taking chances, even bringing in another team member to cover graphics and the looks versus performance aspect of design.
They are already previewing and getting feedback on the backer’s tiers they plan to offer and some of the incentive concepts they plan to run with as part of the planned Kickstarter campaign, including something called Founder’s Points. Those were mentioned in the Camelot Unchained newsletter if you subscribed to the mailing list.
I also said that that would be prizes and pie for all. Well, maybe I did not mention pie but I know I mentioned prizes so here is the first one. Everybody who has subscribed to our mailing before the Kickstarter launches will receive additional Founders Points. What are Founder’s Points you might ask? Well, stay tuned for the developer diaries to find out.
We haven’t gotten that developer diary entry yet. These points will be redeemable for something, and you’ll get a few extra if you bought their March on Oz game, though they will be tracked based on the email address you use… and crap, I used a different email address for iOS purchases, Amazon payments, and signing up for email lists. So I’m probably going to miss out on some points on that front.
But we still do not know when this Kickstarter campaign is going to kick off.
All of which, as I said above, is very different from how the Lord British campaign went.
Part of it is, I am sure, due to the asymmetry of the situations. At one level it is two industry veterans playing to their fans and trying to revive what they felt was great about some of their past. And, oddly, both sold past companies to Electronic Arts and are now building on IPs similar to what they did in the past.
But Lord British has better name recognition and probably a bigger fan base built up over time. This was no doubt helped by his Lord British character being part of the games and by the fact that his Ultima series of games spanned two decades. We tend to remember that and not Tabula Rasa.
Meanwhile, Mark Jacobs, whose last great work was Dark Age of Camelot, has to live in the shadow Warhammer Online and a fashion designer. So he has to build up some momentum in advance that Lord British could probably achieve on name recognition alone. And then there are the teams behind the games. Lord British shows all the games that his Shroud of the Avatar team have touched on the Kickstarter page, while Mark’s lineup is… a little more whimsical.
Still, even with the different relative positions and project goals, it is hard for me not to compare these two projects, at least when it comes to their Kickstarter ambitions.
Lord British has made his million dollar goal, though he hasn’t exactly sped through the stretch goals. Still, he can claim victory. And he still has more than a week left to go, so there could still be a big surprise reveal on the plan.
Meanwhile, we do not even know how much money Mark Jacobs will be asking for. Or when he will start asking for it. And given how front-loaded all of the work has been so far, I will be interested to see how the Camelot Unchained 30 day funding campaign will unfold. What is he holding back? What reveals does he have in his pocket, waiting for just the right time? Who is he going to insult in a controversial mid-campaign interview?
I can hardly wait to see how it plays out.
Oh… and if a good game or two comes from all of this, so much the better!
Anyway, expect that I will follow Camelot Unchained as vigorously as I have Shroud of the Avatar.
Addendum:
This just came in email, indicating at least that the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter is closer than I thought. Also, they updated the CU web site since I wrote this. Things look different and all links may not work. Also, “working title” appears to have gone missing, so it looks like it will be Camelot Unchained.
Pardon the Delay!
Folks,
The bad news is that Kickstarter campaign for Camelot Unchained is not going to start today. The good news is that our project is currently in review. As soon as Kickstarter approves our project, we will announce the official Kickstarter launch date. We have no reason to expect that it won’t be approved next week but our project is rather “complicated” as there are a ton of moving parts, including 30 very detailed reward tiers, all the individual rewards, Founder’s Exchange (the store), etc. Due to that complexity, the holiday and the typical studio issues of weather/illness/CPU going boom/etc., it took us just a little bit longer than we thought it would to put it all together so please accept our apologies for this brief delay.
We are going to take advantage of this “downtime” to post material from the campaign, starting with our pledge tiers. Our plan is to break up the tiers into multiple blog posts with the first part going up, on our brand new website, later today.
We will let you know the Kickstarter campaign’s starting date after our project is approved. Again, sorry for the brief delay but when you see our Kickstarter presentation next week, I hope you will agree that it was worth waiting for, even if the wait is just a wee bit longer than expected.
Mark
