Crowfall’s founder update hit the ArtCraft site this afternoon, and it’s a doozy. The studio’s J Todd Coleman says development progress is “fantastic,” and he should be excited, since the team just scored a fresh $12M from investors.
“As we head into 2020, with beta right around the corner, we are excited to announce the final phase of this strategy is now complete,” he says. “ArtCraft closed an additional round of financing, in the amount of $12m, to complete Crowfall, launch it and bring it to market.” Gamers will recall the studio raised $6M from investors at the start of 2018 as well, in addition to $1.7M raised on Kickstarter and $600K in Indiegogo-based equity crowdfunding. That, plus additional investment and several million in pledges on the website, brings the game to a reported $35M in total funding.
Coleman also drops another big stat, asserting that the game’s crowdfunding, Kickstarter and on-site together, prove that they have “more than 65,000 people willing to pay for Crowfall.” This figure appears to refer specifically to almost 64K backers listed; 336K people are registered on the game’s website.
Critically, ArtCraft is turning its attention to beta after several delays and then significant alpha testing throughout 2019; the studio reminds players to register on the site for invite waves, though backers will have automatic access.
“Right now, our team is busy wrapping up the milestone (which we call 5.110, War of the Gods). We’re getting pretty close on that; “pencils down” is not far off. Then we go into bug fixing and polishing mode, which traditionally maps to a pattern of one week of polish for every month of development. At some point during this process, we’ll push the new version up to our TEST server so that we can get some external eyes on it. Once it looks good enough for our general backer audience (not just those of you who are crazy enough to deal with TEST issues), we’ll move it to LIVE and start sending out the beta invitations in waves. Not every feature will be in this version — we still have a few loose ends to tie up — but a LOT of the game will be there. Most of it, in fact.”
Massively OP’s PvP MMO column, Fight or Kite, spent a significant chunk of time in the game reporting back on its progress over 2019; you can check those out below:
