The team behind Ship of Heroes has just announced that it’s canceling its Kickstarter. Since the crowdfund’s launch on April 4th, it had raised only $35,138 of its $400,000 goal.
“We’ve had a very successful first day of fundraising, and then a slowdown,” Heroic Games’ Casey McGeever told backers in today’s update. “It does not look to us like we will reach our current goal of $400,000. So we did what we usually do, we listened to you, our supporters, to see what you are thinking. And we have drawn some conclusions. We went to Kickstarter too early. Our goal was high, and surprisingly many potential donors are only hearing about Ship of Heroes for the first time right now; they are understandably confused about some aspects of the game, and hesitant to support it just yet.”
Consequently, the team has vowed to cancel the Kickstarter and return to development while “raising awareness of the game.” A donation option will eventually be available on the game’s website for those who want to chip in.
The game is an Unreal 4 engine, full-scale MMORPG heavily inspired by City of Heroes, but with a bit more sci-fi flair as its core city is literally on a massive starship. Alpha was expected to begin later this year, though the team says it’s rejiggering its development plans a bit:
“Meanwhile, we’ll focus on core features, scaling our development to the amount of money available. We’ll limit the initial Ship of Heroes launch to missions and enemies in the already-built level, Apotheosis City, and to the first 20 levels of character advancement. […] We’ve built enough of the game that we expect to launch the revised version around the end of 2018. So we are working towards a more tightly-defined game, one with an earlier release date. Our long-term vision of a large ship with multiple levels visiting planets has not changed; we just need to link our schedule and scope to our revenues.”
