Beast’s Fury is a 2d fighting game that had a successful Indiegogo campaign back in June 2013, raising over $21,000 of a $5000 flexible funding goal. In May 2014 the games developers launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise money to improve the games quality, ultimately raising $47.256. Then, earlier this year they returned to Indiegogo and asked for $185,000, eventually raising only 1% of that. In November this year an apology was posted on Facebook stating that they made mistakes and asked for forgiveness and will be taking Beasts Fury in a new direction.
I’ve followed the game since the first Indiegogo campaign and have played many of the builds, and while the game shows promise the progress has been very slow. To wit: only two playable characters and stages have been released after 2 years. I think it’s just an unfortunate case of poor planning; after the first campaign the developers wanted to improve the quality of the demo with more animations, so the budget swelled. For the first and second campaign the money was just for completing a demo to show to publishers in hopes of getting picked up, but the developers found that the publisher offers weren’t favorable enough and launched the ill-fated third crowdfunding campaign to fund the whole amount.
In the end it’s all about budgeting and perception. The initial campaigns were not asking for huge amounts of money, and backers were forgiving about a second campaign since improvements in the game were obvious. However, asking to finance a demo on the hope of a publisher picking it up may have given an air of uncertainty to things, and by the time the third campaign launched it was too much.
As it stands now neither of the Beast’s Fury Indiegogo campaign pages have been updated in 5+ months. The Kickstarter, and its 797 backers that donated $47,256 AUD, hasn’t seen a word from the developer in 10 months. The official Beast’s Fury website? Nothing but an imposing “Domain suspended” message. On the plus side, though, the Beast’s Fury Twitter and Facebook accounts are active on a regular basis.
In the end I hope the game does get a full release, but without the financial backing it doesn’t look likely.
