Earlier this month, the team at Camouflaj announced their Kickstarter project for a brand new console-style game for iOS called Republique. While it initially saw a substantial influx of pledges, it quickly dropped off in numbers. It stalled, and I started to worry that the game wouldn’t get the funding it needed.
As of last night, the Kickstarter project has pivoted. Instead of being a $500,000 USD project for what looks like an awesome survival game for iOS, it is now a $500,000 USD project for a survival game for iOS, Windows, and OS X. While more platform support sounds good on the surface, this is very worrying. The budget already seemed quite tight for the goals they’ve presented for iOS. For the same budget, the team now has to develop two distinctly different versions of the same game. Corners have to be cut somewhere.
Sure, the game might not suffer if they just extend the development time, but extending the development time means paying people more. Money isn’t free. If they need other funding to get the game made, what is the reason for using Kickstarter at that point? It would essentially just function as a pre-order mechanism. That’s not really what the platform is for.
As of publication, they have reached over $100,000 USD of their $500,000 USD goal, and they have 14 days left to go. Let’s hope they meet their goal, and hope harder that they’re not getting in too deep.
