Day For Night's Black Glove falls short on Kickstarter
Former Irrational devs failed to raise even half of $550,000 target
Day For Night Games has pledged to "fight like hell" to prevent The Black Glove from being cancelled after its Kickstarter campaign finished well short of its $550,000 goal.
The fledgling studio's debut project finished with $216,517. Day For Night is currently "pursuing all options" to save its debut project, including talking to publishers, though trying a new crowdfunding campaign with a lower target seems to be a last resort.
"We asked for the total we needed to guarantee that we could self-publish the game within a year with 6+ hours worth of content for $20," the studio said in an update on its Kickstarter page.
"If we turned around immediately and asked for less without having secured the rest of the funds necessary, we wouldn't be able to guarantee our Kickstarter backers that we could deliver the game."
Kickstarter campaigns are hardly a rarity at the moment, but Day For Night Games received more attention than most new developers taking that route due to its pedigree. The studio was formed by veterans of Irrational Games after its "winding down" in February this year.
Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz last month, Day For Night's Joe Fielder, who was a writer and producer on Bioshock Infinite, described Kickstarter as "vitally important" to realising the studio's ambitious vision for the game.
"The Black Glove won't get made without it," Fielder said. "We definitely considered more traditional funding routes like finding angel investment, but we always felt like self-publishing was the answer for us. There are many indie games that showed that you can go directly to the fans. That's not to say we think that publishers are bad, but we feel like this is the best way to make an uncompromisingly original game."
And yet Kickstarter seems to be less and less reliable as a source of funding for original projects all the time. This year, in particular, has seen a clear shift in the perception of crowdfunding, aided by anecdotal evidence of struggle, some high-profile near misses, and a marked decline in the amount of money invested in games by the Kickstarter community.