The Kickstarter for Hero's Song, the new game being developed by former SOE and Daybreak Games President John Smedley and his recently-founded Pixelmage Games studio, has been canceled. The campaign was launched last week, but after notching up just $137,000 on an $800,000 goal, the team has decided to opt for investment backing instead.
“After looking at our funding levels and the reality that we aren't going to reach our funding goals, we've decided that the best thing to do is to end the Kickstarter. We sincerely appreciate all of the support we got from the backers and the Kickstarter community,” Smedley wrote in a Kickstarter update posted today. “This was our first Kickstarter and we made mistakes along the way. I want to acknowledge that right up front. We put a lot of time and effort into the Kickstarter, but it's obvious missing things like physical goods hampered our efforts. It's also fair to say because we're early that we didn't have enough gameplay to show the game off enough to get people over the hump.”
Smedley said when the Kickstarter began that it was first and foremost an exercise in community-building, and that provisions for funding above and beyond the crowdfunding goal, should it prove necessary, were already in place. Investors are now going to cover the entire cost of the game, meaning that the project will go ahead without any reliance on publishers, which Smedley said "was of key important to us so that we could remain in creative control.”
Despite the end of the Kickstarter, the studio pledged to continue posting regular updates and development streams, “and being completely transparent with our development process. You'll be hearing from us all the time and we'll be updating our website and all of you on a constant basis as we have cool stuff to show.”
With the Kickstarter crapped out, the home for future happenings on the Hero's Song front will be, for now at least, pixelmagegames.com.
