Thus Ends the Transverse Crowdfunding Campaign
The crowdfunding campaign for Piranha Games’ Star Citizen clone (or their improvement upon the idea of Wing Commander Online, assuming they ever even had the Wing Commander license in the the first place) has ended in the way that pretty much everyone expected it would: abject failure.
With seven days to go, Piranha Games has decided to pull the plug on the crowd funding campaign for their space based title Transeverse. The message from Piranha reads:
It’s a bitter sweet day. Thank you for taking a chance and showing us that you are interested in seeing our vision come to life. As you can see, the velocity of our crowdfunding campaign never gained the momentum needed to bring Transverse to life as a community funded concept. We are going to shut down our funding today, ahead of the 30 day deadline and begin the process of refunding as promised.
We plan to take Transverse behind the curtain for now. One day, I hope to see you on the Fringe!
The campaign launched under heavy criticism from the Mech Warrior Online community who were frustrated with Piranha’s progress in providing expected game features. The campaign also started with some very odd funding goals that made no sense whatsoever.
That’s putting it mildly. Launching a crowdfunding campaign for a space combat sim where the $1 million goal (later $500,000) is basic spaceflight, and the $2 million goal (later $1 million, I think) is space combat is more than just “odd”, I think.
Holy shit, I didn’t see their stretch goals. That’s pretty funny. I liked the concept for the game, but apparently whoever was in charge of the crowdfunding had a crack pipe superglued to his lips.
And for ONE MILLION DOLLARS you get to…wait for it…fly around in SPACE!!!!!!!!! For a cool two mil, you get bounding box collision and…BULLETS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sign me up.
WHY ARE ALL OUR STRETCH GOALS CORE GAMEPLAY FEATURES?
Heh…the fools. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what goes though people’s minds when witnessing something incomprehensibly stupid. It’s a shame, too. I’m all about the “what is it to be human” question.
I follow the indie scene and something I’ve noticed is that lately there are a LOT of space-sim themed games in the works. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or spawned from CR’s success, or if there are greater social forces at work and the stars aligned for a rebirth of the genre. I’d love to know the answer to that riddle. The indie scene showed us that platformers, shmups, beat ’em ups and classic JRPG’s are still viable genres. I’m guessing that between Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous we’ll know just how thirsty the market really is for a space sim rebirth. That there is no Star Trek series currently in production is a bad sign. Maybe CR could drop a word to CBS.