What do you do when your game hits a snag on Steam Greenlight? You can take the route Code Avarice, among many others, have taken, and bring your game to the people via Kickstarter.
Paranautical Activity has an edge above other Kickstarter campaigns. First off, the game can already be purchased as a playable product. A combination FPS/roguelike, you enter a voxel world, fighting randomly generated enemies to pick up loot and powerups.
However, the game is technically still in beta, and work on the game has hit a snag since it's not making enough money to fund development. Now, developers Code Avarice were on Steam Greenlight, and got approached by Adult Swim Games about publishing the game, but was kicked out of Greenlight by Valve themselves three months ago. As the developers themselves explained to green9090 on YouTube, Valve didn't want future devs to think getting a publisher was a shortcut to getting past Greenlight.
You can watch the developer interview below, which has a lot of strong language lobbied against Steam. Warning: this video contains NSFW language.
Immediately after this, Code Avarice made a new Greenlight page, and were looking forward to still getting some support from Adult Swim, but fast forwarding to today, they can no longer wait.
On the Kickstarter page, Code Avarice explains they need to crowdfund to finish development of the game, and help bring their vision of it to fruition. The good news is, since a big portion of the game has been completed, they don't need that much more funding compared to other projects. $ 10,000 is all they need to get this done.
Furthermore, stretch goals also aren't that pricey and will add a lot of great things to the game. $ 12,000 is enough to add Oculus Rift support, $ 15,000 will let them add an Infinity Mode, and $ 20,000 and $ 30,000 will let them add co-operative and competitive multiplayer, respectively.
The game's existing fanbase has spoken with their wallets, many of whom I'm sure already paid for the game full price. As of now, the crowdfund has reached $ 5,591, way past half the initial goal. At this rate, Code Avarice have a good chance of getting all the way to $ 30,000 and they should definitely be lobbying for it.
We can only hope Valve can turn things around for Steam Greenlight, but it's great that Kickstarter and other funding alternatives are available for indies.
Source: Kickstarter
