What crowdfunding giveth, crowdfunding also withholdeth. This is the hard lesson that Trials of Ascension has had to learn, not once, but twice.
Less than two weeks after launching its second Kickstarter campaign and raising only $25,616 out of a desired $600,000, the team admitted defeat. “The writing on the wall is clear,” the team posted. “Our Kickstarter project has about the same odds of success as a snowball’s chance in that really hot place nobody ever wants to visit. As such, we’ve made the decision to cancel it.”
One team member, who left days into the Kickstarter campaign, posted a behind-the-scenes explanation on the forums about what went wrong. He wrote that he blames the owners for poor decisions leading up to an ill-advised crowdfunding campaign.
“The day of the Kickstarter, an announcement that we’d be on IRC instead of streaming was made without BLD’s and my knowing,” he wrote. “Then we were told we would be unable to stream at that time. The Kickstarter should have been postponed at that point, but the launch button was hit. It was then I saw a goal of $600,000, and I knew immediately that the Kickstarter would fail. That was $20,000 a day, and there was NO WAY we could hit that. We don’t have the userbase.”
[Source: Reddit, forums, Kickstater]
