As American McGee puts it, its the end of the rainbow as his pending OZ themed game Kickstarter has been cancelled. Originally called OZombie, McGee struggled with the campaign and communication early on, and intended to rally and relaunch the campaign a few days ago, but he has now made the call to just end it outright.
McGee mainly cites his pending Alice project as the main reason. He verified that he would not be able to launch a separate Kickstarter for Alice without cancelling the current campaign. The window of opportunity to obtain the Alice film rights is limited by time, so he had to place Alice as a higher priority.
Furthermore, McGee explains that it was highlty unlikely that the project was going to be a success anywway. They were only able to reach 20 % of the funding goal and they estimated they would only hit 30 % by the end of the campaign period. They did consider moving the campaign to indiegogo, but they already had a captive audience in Kickstarter so they decided not to pursue it.
This does not close down all possibility that Spicy Horse Games will make the Oz game in the future. McGee intimates that they simply have to place Alice as a priority now since that would be a challenging campaign on its own. At the end, McGee tells everyone to look forward to the Alice project and redirects them to its Facebook page.
Unsurprisingly, this just adds to the narrative of the untrustworthiness of crowdfunding projects, and it really is unfair. McGee's decision means that all the backers are getting their money back, and it is true that film rights are difficult to obtain or buy back in Hollywood. Unfortunately, there is a growing disillusionment with crowdfunded games and game projects, which is also an injustice to those campaigns that did get succesfully funded, are already deep in production, and show a lot of promise, like Shovel Knight and Oculus Rift. Crowdfunding will need some good press to get out of this narrative soon.
