The hammer has more or less fallen on Wildman. The ambitious RTS slash action RPG, still on Kickstarter after severe layoffs, may never see its full necessary funding and thus, the light of day. An introspective Chris Taylor is now talking with the media and public about the status of the game at length, most recently discussing with Eurogamer a number of the factors that led him to bring Wildman to Kickstarter in the first place. Among them, issues in publishing management that can lead to entire games being canned at the last second, an issue he's apparently dealt with on "multiple" titles:
"There's multiple games that we got almost to the finish line on…We got a phone call from the publisher and they said, 'We're terminating.' And we're like, 'Yeah but we're only a month away from beta!' And they're like, 'Yeah we're still terminating.' And we're like, 'OK.' "
"…We're creating original titles, we're pitching original games, getting people excited at publishers. Management changes over a few times, the person who signed it is gone – the person who championed it is gone. New management comes in and says, 'What the hell is this?' And this happens across the industry."
He also at one point discusses the reaction to his decision to lay off his staff and place the fate of the game in the hands of the public, which sprung accusations of courting the media to manipulate the community to drive in the money, saying:
"…I think GPG would have truly been dead if I hadn't laid off the team, but of course there was no way for me to know what would happen…Some have said that it was an elaborate scheme to manipulate people… I'm like, wow, you've got to be kidding me… anyone who could pull that off has much bigger balls than me. I am still shocked that anyone could even think that, especially people who know me… and I've been in the business 25 years, I've got a reputation, and I've never, ever, been known to pull that kind of s**t.
"Oh, and the part I forgot to add… the entire industry has been alerted to what happened, and we've never received more attention from companies that are recruiting people… in other words, by getting media attention, we have the best chance to find jobs for those who are moving on. It's really a win-win situation."
I too am a bit surprised by some of the negative assumptions about Chris Taylor's decision. It's easy to be glib when reading walls of soulless text on the Internet, but after watching the video he posted on Kickstarter, I found it hard to see him as manipulative or scheming. Idealist, naive, and misguided perhaps, but not so childish and immature as to resort to pulling media stunts. As he details earlier in the article, getting a game funded in the first place is extremely difficult, and with ever rotating casts in management, sometimes games that are nearly finished can get canned for seemingly no reason. Going all in on Kickstarter has been a refreshing opportunity to change that dynamic on its head entirely. In the end, he protected his employees, trying to ensure that for whatever bad decision he may have made, that the people who believed in him would not end up paying for it. Whether or not the project is overly ambitious and risky, if he's looked out for them first and foremost, thus I find it difficult to be too hard on him.
Nonetheless he doesn't want your pity money. The beauty of Kickstarter is that only the games that people truly believe in will get the funding they need, and that is a dynamic that Taylor supports:
"I'm really not happy that too many people are pledging not because they like the game but because they feel sorry for us.That's not what making games is about! I feel terrible about that. I want people to support it because they like the idea. Otherwise it's not a true process. If it's the wrong game at the wrong time, then we need to be sent packing."
What will happen remains yet to be seen. As of now, their Kickstarter has $302,000 of the needed $1.1 million.
