The gaming industry has certainly been shaken up by the crowdfunding concept. Rather than being the passive audience of the highly secretive world of the big games manufacturers, gaming fans are now being given the chance to shape their own entertainment futures by kickstarting some seriously innovative games.
However, given the somewhat chaotic nature of crowdfunding exercises, they are more prone to uncertainty than traditional console and mobile casino releases. So here’s a look at some of the most high-profile crowdfunded games and what’s happened to them.
One of the biggest names to hit crowdfunding is undoubtedly Star Citizen. Despite amassing over $114 million in funding, the game was notably absent from this years’s E3 video game fair and with a growing pressure on Cloud Imperium Games to live up to the hype, it’s going to be interesting to see whether this space simulator can become the biggest crowdfunded success story yet.
There’s certainly been no shortage of suspended crowdfunded games that have shown that this business model is not foolproof. And although Prison Architect finally arrived after over three years of funding brought it $19 million, it has hardly set the world alight in terms of finding a mainstream audience.
But perhaps the true appeal of crowdfunding is that it allows certain niche gaming genres to find a dedicated fanbase in the otherwise difficult and crowded marketplace. And whilst casino gaming has yet to realize its potential in the crowdfunding realm, examples like the Gaming Club show that there is a niche market for just about every imaginable game online.
And like the poker games found on these mobile casino site, it’s the human interaction that’s really helped crowdfunded games happen. The sheer popularity of MMO games on the Kickstarter website reveals the potential that these games have, and Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues could be one of the best crowdfunded-MMO games yet.
Having already raised nearly $9 million, it’s gained a huge amount of attention by the way that the giant role-playing game will allow players to create their own narrative themes in an open-world format that would simply have been unimaginable just a decade ago.
And with the Steam Greenlight system becoming a go-to for any gamer who’s interested in tailoring gaming output to their own requirements, it’s become clear that it’s not just mobile casino games that are putting players more in charge of their own gaming destiny.
