The Soapbox: The trouble with Kickstarter | Massively
Don't get me wrong; the project hit nearly double its funding goal, and one cannot fault the design staff with lack of ambition. But 434 potential players does not exactly send a message to gaming companies. Just to put that in contrast, the critically acclaimed commercial flop Psychonauts sold marginally less than 100,000 copies.
This isn't unique to Embers of Caerus. Pathfinder Online ended with around 4,250 backers. Shadowrun Online got a hair over 6,000. The Repopulation hit 739. But when you're specifically backing your game by claiming that this is hitching your horse to Team Sandbox, it's actually worse for Team Sandbox when your warning shot looks pretty tiny
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So using crowdfunding as a prelaunch, preorder strategy is dicey. Unless you figure that people only read as far as "massively wildly popular on kickstarter" and transpose.
Which, let's face it, no one does. :)
haha...but it's Shadowrun
Sorry, does Shadowrun have a history that makes it special?
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun
The Shadowrun role-playing game has spawned Shadowrun: The Trading Card Game, four video games, an action figure game (Shadowrun Duels), two magazines, an art book and more than 50 novels, starting with the Secrets of Power series which introduces some of the original characters of Shadowrun and gives a good introduction to this fictional universe. In addition to the main rule book (now in its fourth edition) there have been over 100 supplemental books published with adventures and expansions to both the rules and the game settings.
