Avellone: It doesn't matter if Project Eternity is a flop

Outspoken Obsidian Entertainment creative director Chris Avellone has revealed some of the high and lows he's encountered on funding RPG Project Eternity through a Kickstarter campaign, including the reduction in pressure on hitting sales targets post-release.

"Actually, it doesn't matter if it's a flop, although I don't believe that it will be," he told Gamasutra.

"The nice thing about Kickstarter is that people have already paid for the title. So anything else that happens after that is great, but we know what our budget is, and practically speaking, that's all we're really focused on: 'We're going to make a game for this amount of money.'"

He explained that unlike normal development, post-release sales were a bonus. The real focus was on making the best game possible for the people who had already opened their wallets.

"We already have the backer support. They've already paid for it. That's our end destination. If it ends up getting released and selling a lot of copies, great. If it sells enough where we can support future instalments, we'll absolutely do that. If it doesn't make much of a profit, and we did want to do another instalment, we'd probably take it back to Kickstarter."

Of course Project Eternity, a successor to Planescape: Torment, had no trouble finding backers on the crowdfunding site. In fact it hit its $1.1 million target in a single day. It then went on to raise a total of over $3.9 million.

"Hitting the funding the first day was awesome and also scary at the same time, because we were like, 'Oh my god, we have to figure out these stretch goals a lot faster than we'd planned for,'" admitted Avellone.