The road to successful funding for Republique has been a long, arduous one. While other game projects like Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 had it easy, Camouflaj, the developer of Republique, had to work it hard to squeak by on the last day of their Kickstarter Project.
Why? Well, it’s a tough question to answer, and I doubt even the developer knows for sure what the major issue was. The easiest explanation would be that potential pledgers were hesitant to back a project from a development company that hasn’t proven itself yet. Okay, maybe, but that doesn’t smell right to me. These aren’t nobodies. They don’t have the cachet of the people like Schafer, Lowe, and Fargo, but the people working on the game have worked on some very well respected games. That counts for something. Maybe the iOS-only aspect turned some people off. Fine, that played some part in it — there was a bump in the number of backers when the Windows/Mac port was announced. But after seeing iPhone-only products get funded over and over on Kickstarter, it seems strange to me that there wasn’t a big enough chunk of the Venn diagram of console gamers and iOS users.
At this point, Kickstarter and its imitators are too new to be fully understood. Heck, it wasn’t until Double Fine Adventure’s break-through a few months back that video games of any substantial size saw success on Kickstarter at all. There is still a lot to be learned about this strange new world, and many an economics paper will be written about it.
