The Kickstarter for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen finished up earlier today.
While there was a surge of pledges at the end, the final total came in at $460,657, well shy of the $800,000 goal. (But about where I predicted back on January 1st.)
The daily numbers ended up looking like this according to Kicktraq:
Daily figures for the campaign
With that result, Visionary Realms and Brad McQuaid are now moving into a new dimension of crowd funding, going it alone and asking for donations. Their site is up and ready to take PayPal.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, going that route really changes, to my mind, the whole funding dynamic. There is no minimum threshold for funding. You pledge and they have your cash. And while that has worked well for other games, Star Citizen has gone insane in it post-Kickstarter financing and even Lord British has managed to come up with another million for Shroud of the Avatar, I am not sure how things will play out in the absence of successful Kickstarter campaign.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I’m not sure whats different about what Pantheon is now doing, and what Sony Online Entertainment just completed doing with Landmark. To be honest, I don’t really care as long as it gets made.
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Vini, Vidi, Scripsi…
My Latin is a little rusty… “He drank wine; he played video games; he wrote about it”?
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@Scree – Except that I don’t think SOE is depending on selling alpha access. That is just a bit of extra cash. Brad needs the dough. And if he only gets enough to get part way, your donation won’t be worth much.
@Chris – Veni, Vidi, Scripsi – I came, I saw, I wrote.
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I just played a couple of hours of Project Gorgon. It’s free, they’re updating and expanding it all the time, it looks great and it has that old school feel. Plus the vendors there resell loot players sold to them!
I do hope Pantheon makes it but it’s not like there aren’t other options available for people who’d like another quasi-1999 3D Diku MUD.
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@Bhagpuss – And it is another project done on the Unity platform which also failed its Kickstarter. Hrmm…
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Huh, thanks for the Project Gorgon mention, Bhagpuss. I’ve been kind of looking for an old school game to dabble in with all the Vanguard and Pantheon news lately, and that will fit the bill!
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@Wilhelm
Sorry, I was trying to be funny in a not very coherent way.
I think your new motto (which I accept could be years old and I have only just noticed) very neatly encapsulates what is great about TAGN.
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I suppose that one measure of how well this project transitions from Kickstarter to completely self-run funding is whether or not they start announcing how much funding they have accrued. I wouldn’t bother posting numbers myself until I had gotten past, say, 250K. We shall see..
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Unlike Brad and his too many designers I have always thought Eric Heimburg with Sandra Powers have the engineering background to program what they design.
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