Crowfall has a lot to cheer about this morning: ArtCraft Entertainment just announced that it has “amassed more than $3 million in crowdfunding to bring [its] flagship MMO title, Crowfall, to a total funding amount of $10 million.”
The PvP MMORPG raised over $1.7 million through Kickstarter a year and a half ago and has continued raising funds on its own platform since.
Most recently, the devs have shifted their focus from fun match-based tests to larger-scale foundational testing on the permanent persistent server, which the team is calling its “Big World” milestone. Last May, the team retooled its test cadence entirely to prepare for an unspecified soft launch of the game for early backers while major features continue to be iterated.
Here’s the full press release:
AUSTIN, Texas, November 2, 2016 — Independent game developer ArtCraft Entertainment, Inc. announced today they have amassed more than $3 million in crowdfunding to bring their flagship MMO title, Crowfall, to a total funding amount of $10 million. This news comes just days before the launch of their first external persistent world playtest.
“Over 18 months ago, Crowfall became one of the top 20 video game crowdfunding projects of all time, collecting almost $1.8m from over 16,000 backers,” explained Gordon Walton, president and executive producer at ArtCraft Entertainment. “We continue to see amazing growth, with new backers joining our community every month.”
A new type of massively-multiplayer online experience, Crowfall is a Throne War Simulator, a dynamic virtual world where kings, queens, mercenaries and assassins vie for supremacy using military strength, economic might and political power.
Crowfall differs from standard MMOs in that each server represents a single “campaign” with a unique map, unique rules, and a limited timeframe. Each campaign lasts only a few months before one guild or alliance conquers the map and wins, and the players move on to the next campaign.
“It’s amazing that we crossed this milestone just days before the first public test of our persistent world server,” notes J. Todd Coleman, ArtCraft Entertainment CEO and chief creative officer. “Until now, we’ve been limited to testing modular systems like combat or castle destruction. This is our first chance to play the game in a large, sprawling game world and for days instead of hours.”
This milestone marks a technical turning-point for the project, offering players a chance to log into persistent game worlds located in North America and Europe. The European servers will be hosted and serviced by Crowfall’s EU partner, Travian Games.
