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Fresh3D has said it does not believe its Kickstarter for Outcast Reboot HD will reach its $600,000 funding goal.
The project currently stands at $254,808 with only eight hours remaining.
“When we started this campaign, I was so excited that I could not imagine that we could eventually fail. Shame on me!” wrote Fresh3D technical director Yann Robert. “This same over-confidence, this same craziness and this same adventurousness, which 15 years ago led us to create the original game, lead us to face the harsh reality of this Kickstarter failure which could have been avoided with a bit more time, thinking and upfront money.
“We have received backing from over 5,100 of you for about $253.000, which is an amazing average pledge level. We are profoundly grateful and deeply touched by this amazing generosity.
“Unfortunately, despite a rather good start, the pitch and the content we presented were not attractive enough to convince more backers (especially those who didn’t play the original game) and did not manage to reach the overestimated funding goal of $600.000.”
Robert goes on to address a number of mistakes he believes were made in handling the Kickstarter campaign.
“This was our first KS campaign and we did a number of mistakes,” he explained. “Before launching the campaign, we knew that we were lacking content and the goal was high but we did not take the measure of their impact on the failure of the project.
“We should have set a lower initial goal from the beginning, include more platforms, provide more attractive and more professional videos, lower the next-gen console stretch goal, post more updates with more attractive content, properly plan these updates in advance to free our time for promoting the campaign. We should have better explain the key features of the game and the high quality values of this remake compared to the original, do not mix old gen gameplay with new gen rendering, and ultimately, we should have shown a gameplay demo with the new characters or at least a representative trailer. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough assets to produce a trailer due to tight financing and we expected this funding to really “kickstart” the project.”
He continued: “I think we made a wrong assumption from the start, thinking that the original game could be our ‘draft prototype’ and let people imagine how good the game could be just by showing the first glimpse of the environment in HD and a list of improvements, while asking folks to trust us based on the experience of the team. Part of that, is of course due to a lack of upfront financing which also forced us to rush the campaign. I really hope that we’ll be able to sort this point for the next step.”
However, Robert believes the project does have a future.
“Thanks to your commitment and the overall feedback we received, we truly believe, more than ever, that this project deserves to be done and we are more than eager to make it happen,” he concluded. “Will it be through another Kickstarter or another crowdfunding platform, paypal, private investment, some bank loans, public support, distributor deals or a mix of all that, we will see.”
Funding officially closes at 10.59pm BST.
Source: Kickstarter
