Game Falls $28 Short Of $50,000 Kickstarter Goal

This has got to be agonizing. DreamQuest games wasn’t looking for an insane amount of money when they put their planned game, Alpha Colony up on Kickstarter. All they wanted was $50,000 to develop the exploration, building and trading simulation for PCs and mobile devices. The detailed explanation, with screenshots, and a playable browser-based demo suggested that if it wasn’t a good game, it was at least a serious project undertaken by people with industry experience.

And it came in $28 short of the goal.

“Kickstarter is very strict about their terms and our project will not be funded,” said a statement, which appears to have been written by lead programmer Christopher Williamson, on the game’s Facebook page. “Obviously, we are very disappointed. We have invested 10 months and over $60,000 of our own money into this project. It is so frustrating to come so close, but clearly there simply isn’t that much interest in building the kind of game I envisioned.

“I have already invested everything I have getting my dream this far (twice!) and now I must feed my family and focus on projects that will pay the bills,” he added. “I have been trying to build this game for almost 14 years so I doubt this is the end for Alpha Colony, but I do have to be responsible business owner and father and accept the reality of where we are at the moment and what the world wants.”

Some jerk then left a really nasty comment. “Obviously it’s not that important to you if 14 years of your life isn’t worth a lousy $28,” he said. Someone else said something along the same lines but had the courtesy to delete it later.

Still, Williamson addressed why he or someone else didn’t just PayPal a quick $28 to secure the funding. “We did put quite a bit of our own money into the project as well as the Kickstarter campaign,” he wrote. “We just had some bad luck on the timing of things. All I can say is the Universe is trying to tell us something here. … We could very well have lost even MORE money building this game and delivering the rewards. $50,000 is still an absurdly small amount of money to develop a modern 3D game on 3 platforms.”

Alpha Colony [Kickstarter]

Alpha Colony [Official Site]

Originally written and published by Owen Good at Kotaku. Click here to read the original story.