This past month, we’ve been keeping an eye on a little fantasy MMORPG called Past Fate that’s been waging a crowdfunding campaign to help with its development. And it’s been a successful campaign, too, closing out at $25,364 with the help of over a hundred backers, several of whom pitched in as much as $4000 apiece.
The team said that it wanted to be realistic with the campaign to move Past Fate into the next development phase: “We are asking for a more modest amount that will get our creative departments started with some beautiful and high-quality content.”
Past Fate opened up its alpha server during the Kickstarter for interested parties to check it out. However, as of Monday morning, it looks as though access to it has been shut down.
The title is hoping to launch in late 2022.
We hit our #Kickstarter goal! HUGE Thank You to everyone who backed us! There is still 2 hours left to back the project and to get permanent copy of Past Fate which includes all closed testings, early access and official release!#MMORPG #RPG #MMO #indiedev #indiegame #gamedev pic.twitter.com/tVU6jSSi0w
— Past Fate (@PastFate) August 22, 2020
$25,000 for an MMO? That’s nuts!
Are people that desperate for a new MMO? That they’ll throw thousands at a game that has virtually no chance of launching and finding success? Evidently so.
I think this poster from MMORPG.com raises an interesting point:
“Color me sceptic with how this went down. They had 16 backers for half of the campaign and not even 3000 raised. Then all of a sudden that backer number increased seven times (106 backers in the end) and total funding increased roughly times nine, 25.364. Average spent is 239 dollars, perhaps they mobilized friends and family in the end. I do lots on Kickstarter and have never seen this happen.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir”
Anyone that put money into this is just throwing their money away. You simply cannot build an MMO on this sort of investment.
Maybe the cash is just to keep them going until they can build a functional proof of concept demo. But I doubt that is what they sold the Kickstarter buyers on.
They seem fairly open about the fact that its basically some cash to spend on the asset store but agreed – chances of this one going the distance seem very low.