We weren’t particularly surprised to see My Time at Evershine, the multiplayer follow-up to Pathea Games’ My Time at Portia and My Time at Sandrock, fund on Kickstarter in less than an hour and rush to $1.2M raised on the platform in just a few days. But you definitely surprised Pathea Games, which has penned a memo to players at the halfway mark of the currently $1.8M campaign.
“[I]nternally, we were aiming for somewhere between Sandrock’s $500k and a million,” the devs write. “We had no predictions exceeding $1.5 million, that’s why we were so late in getting some of the stretch goals up. Heck, we never expected to fly pass our original goal in 35 minutes.”
But now, the studio has reoriented its expectations, crunched some numbers, and submitted a proposal for eager players: Get the game to $2.5M on Kickstarter and Pathea will “have the luxury of not doing Early Access this time (or at least not until [it is] very close to final release).”
“Early Access is a double edged sword, while we’re able to get funding and feedback from players well before the end product, it significantly affects our development schedule in a negative way. Each big update we put out will cost us up to a month of packaging, QA, and optimization time, forcing some development to literally stop for a few weeks as key developers work on the release build. If we don’t do Early Access, we will have 4-5 months of extra development time, allowing for a smoother and more traditional development schedule (which we will share later this year). We’ll still get our essential feedback from the numerous KS beta players (who have Alpha access). It means less crunch for the team and a more polished product for the players. That’s a win for everybody.”
The studio is asking plays to promote the Kickstarter and pledge; it’s also working on new stretch goals and pledge tiers, with an AMA on deck for October 13th.
