Updated at 9:00 a.m. Pacific with latest funding total.

With three days left, developer InXile Entertainment’s Torment Kickstarter surpasses Double Fine Adventure’s crowdfunding total. Is Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity next?

Torment: Tides of Numenera has more than 61,000 backers for a total pledge amount just over of $3.52 million. That’s more than Double Fine’s $3,336,371 for its adventure game, now known as Broken Age.

That total actually puts the campaign beyond one of its major stretch goals which will see the Chris Avellone, lead designer on the original Planescape: Torment, join the new game’s design team.

InXile launched its crowdfunding venture nearly a month ago. The campaign ends this Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific). That gives it slightly more than 72 hours to raise the $617,000 it needs to catch up to Obsidian’s Project Eternity. That would make it the most-funded video game Kickstarter yet.

GamesBeat reached out Double Fine to see if they had any hard feelings about another game surpassing them on the Kickstarter leaderboards. As you would expect, they expressed only happy feelings about their fellow developers.

“I think it’s awesome,” Double Fine’s Tim Schafer told GamesBeat. “I want each Kickstarter to be more and more successful because that’s just good news for the games industry.”

“It’s great to watch crowd funding continue to evolve into a viable platform for game financing,” Double Fine vice president of business development Justin Bailey told GamesBeat. “It’s exciting to think that one day AAA games may be financed in this manner, and that a modest point-and-click adventure game helped get it all started!”

Torment is a PC role-playing game followup to the beloved 1999 release Planescape: Torment. InXile is abandoning the Planescape setting for table-top creator Monte Cook’s Numenera world.

Despite the new backdrop, creative lead Colin McComb insists his team will focus on what makes a Torment game a Torment game. As he explained to GamesBeat in December, that is all about finding a theme that will resonate with players.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Ouya probably won’t suffer from a shortage of stuff to play.

The Android-based microconsole already has 481 confirmed games, according to the guys over at Ouyaforum. Developers confirmed each title on the list, but it doesn’t include rumored titles like Electronic Art’s Madden NFL 13 or Minecraft.

You should check out Ouyaforum for the full list, but here’s a very small fraction:

• AirMech from Carbon Games
• Double Fine Adventure from Double Fine
• Final Fantasy III from Square Enix
• The Bard’s Tale from inXile
• Wizorb from Tribute Games

For the unaware, Ouya is a small console that runs the Android operating system with proprietary programs on top of the OS. It connects to televisions through an HDMI port, and it comes with a controller. It’s all about bridging the divide between HD gaming on TVs and the distribution system of smartphones.

The system started as a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter, where it raised $8 million. The system costs $100 and begins shipping to project backers in April. It’ll debut at retail in June.

Nearly 500 releases is a lot for a little startup like Ouya. Chances are, most of those titles are already finished Android apps whose developers are simply re-releasing on Ouya. So maybe it’s not quite as impressive as 500 brand new titles, but it’s still a huge number compared to something like the Wii U, which won’t have 500 games for quite some time.

But Ouya has an advantage. It’s an open-source, download-only ecosystem. It’s the same advantage that a Valve-backed “Steam Box” console PC could have over traditional boxes from Sony and Microsoft.

The way people are accessing games is changing, and the Ouya is poised on the edge of that evolution. The Wii U has made strides with its developer-friendly eShop, but it’s not open enough. At least in terms of bringing in scores of anxious developers, because Ouya isn’t Apple, and yet it is attracting development like it is the newest iOS product.

Ouya is attractive to developers because it’s open. Minecraft could have happened on Ouya (read Wired’s Chris Kohler explanation of The Minecraft Test), but it couldn’t have happened on Nintendo’s Wii U. We’ll see if Microsoft and Sony create an environment where Minecraft could have happened on their systems.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Video games dominated Kickstarter last year, with over $83 million pledged to games-related projects, according to the year-end report the company released early this month. And out of the 16 blockbuster campaigns — those that raised more than $1 million — seven of them were for new games.

That’s no small accomplishment for the industry, but it also shows that video games are ripe for crowdfunding efforts. A lot of factors contribute to success on Kickstarter. So what made these seven projects — Star Citizen, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Planetary Annihilation, Homestuck Adventure, and Project Eternity — such breakaway hits? (The role-playing game Project Eternity earned the most with close to $4 million, and that’s not even counting campaigns for hardware like the Android-based Ouya, which brought in over $8 million.) We spoke to the proud developers and a professor at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to find out.

The right ‘ingredients’ for success

What makes a good Kickstarter? Professor Ethan Mollick, who coauthored the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, told GamesBeat in a phone interview that the most successful projects are run by people with established backgrounds, which leads to success in two key ways.

“It builds a social network of fans, which helps a lot,” he said. “And second, it invites credibility.”

Virtually all of the developers behind last year’s highest-earning Kickstarter games are already well known in the industry. Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun, returned for Shadowrun Returns — one of the reasons Harebrained Schemes studio founder Mitch Gitelman gave us for the campaign’s success.

And Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions found an audience for his campaign by way of his other acclaimed games, like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. Double Fine Adventure raked in a generous $3.3 million when the asking price was only $400,000.

“I think the success of our project can be attributed to a perfect explosion of good timing, a rabid fan base, and the fact that adventure games are a genre that fans have wanted us to revisit for a long time,” Double Fine producer Greg Rice told GamesBeat.

Mollick explained that the best projects use preparatory material to demonstrate what the developers are going to do and how they’re going to accomplish it. The studios put together established teams, acquire outside endorsements, and know how to use social media effectively — all easier to do when people already know your name and your credentials. That gets you faster and more widespread press coverage, too.

Chris Roberts (the creator of the Wing Commander space-flight simulator series) and his team at Cloud Imperium Games took their task seriously, treating crowdfunding like a product launch and promoting the game even before it hit Kickstarter.

“For Star Citizen, I knew I had to raise a significant amount of money as a minimum — $2 million — a higher hurdle than any other crowdfunded game at the time,” he told GamesBeat. “Because of this, I decided that despite having a well-known ‘brand’ in space sims, I needed to go beyond nostalgia and reputation and show people what the game would look and play like.”

Roberts spent a year building a prototype and doing research so he could deliver on his pitch. Cloud Imperium even launched a teaser site a month before the campaign’s launch to spread news of the game virally.

“Over 30,000 people had signed up and were interacting on our forums before we even announced Star Citizen,” he said.

Kickstarters engage three core groups and follow predictable patterns

The best Kickstarters appeal to three populations of people, according to Mollick. They are patrons, who give money because they want a campaign to succeed; customers, who use Kickstarter as a preorder system and purchase low-end rewards packages; and investors, who want to be a part of what’s happening and tend to buy higher-end packages.

Psychologically, the interests of patrons and investors overlap — they want to feel like they’re a part of what’s happening.

“I think you see the most successful projects engage all three of those [groups] with different sets of packages,” said Mollick, although he wasn’t able to specify whether physical or digital rewards (or a combination of both) mattered more.

“I think what you see here is generally a lot of realism from these folks also,” he said, mentioning that over 75 percent of Kickstarter projects deliver late (85 percent for large projects). “Their delivery times are quite far out.”

Most Kickstarters tend to succeed by small margins and fail by large margins, according to an article that Mollick contributed to on Appsblogger.com. And campaign length and goal size matter, too — you have a better chance for success when operating within a 30-day time period and setting a realistic funding goal. Most of these seven projects fell in that category, lasting for about a month and far exceeding their minimum financial needs.

Video games are a good fit

Video game Kickstarters have two main advantages working in their favor, according to Mollick: The existing, broken funding model through traditional publishers, and the capability to handle preorders cheaply.

With a product like the Pebble watch, he said, the company might lose money on each copy itself. But for games like Double Fine Adventure, each copy sold doesn’t cost anything aside from a potential future sale, so developers can feel more comfortable moving some of that cost up to fund development.

Why else do video game Kickstarters do so well? Community plays a big role.

“Games invoke a lot of passion, just like music and other entertainment,” said Mollick. “So you want to help your favorite artist produce something you love, and especially something pure, and Kickstarter lets them do that.”

He also pointed out that these seven projects were almost all sequels of some sort — like Shadowrun Returns. They don’t all necessarily have the same name attached, but known developers are involved and the audiences for them already exist, so these successes aren’t surprising.

Key advice: Shape your campaign around the community

The developers behind last year’s biggest game projects shared a few of their mistakes and tips for those looking to launch new campaigns in 2013.

Rice stressed the importance of interacting and communicating with the people who will be playing your games.

“My advice to all future Kickstarter projects is to try and think like a fan,” he said. “Figure out what story you’re trying to tell with your project, why a fan should be excited about that, and what kind of things a fan would expect from you. After that, it’s all about being very clear and concise with messaging, having a direct and open line of communication, and coming up with a reward structure that is enticing but won’t break the bank.”

Adam Brennecke — one of the directors on Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity, which hit its target goal in a day — told us that the best advice is to be adaptive to how your campaign is progressing.

“Back a few projects and get a feel for how crowdfunding works,” he said. “Take a close look at projects that get funded and try to figure out why they get funded. Look at successful projects and read their updates. Kickstarter is a great place to test the waters with your idea. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back with a revised plan without any real risk to you or your backers.”

Mistakes happen: Here’s what you can learn going forward

“Your time is limited,” said Marc Scattergood, a producer on Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation project. Use it wisely.

“Unless you’re already famous, the most important thing is convince people how awesome your concept is,” he said. “Show the game or the product you’re envisioning, and show it quickly. Then talk about the team and all the extra things that will guarantee its success.

“It’s not done till you run out of time. Keep releasing updates, keep building momentum, and don’t let a single day go where you’re not talking to your community, developing new content and updates to release, and getting people excited.”

In a press world that’s increasingly burned out on Kickstarters, said Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment’s Wasteland 2, finding ways to gain support is more crucial than ever.

“You have to do work on the front end to create awareness and understand your audience before launching,” he said, adding that without the press, “it is very hard to [get funding] unless you have some kind of built-in audience.”

Fargo described “the only drama” he experienced during the campaign: “In my excitement, I used the word ‘social,’ which had negative connotations to Facebook and the new breed of game,” he said. That’s not a word you want to throw around with core gamers.

“I quickly found out that ‘social’ is a four-letter word with two extra letters and had to explain my use of the term,” he said. “The main point with that was that I stayed tuned in with the audience every moment of the campaign to make sure our message didn’t get confused.”

Developers must spend time analyzing the full scope of costs as well, said Mitch Gitelman, who informed us that Shadowrun Returns is now open for preorders.

“Make sure you understand all your costs when planning your campaign and creating your reward tiers,” he said. “In addition to the cost of any physical goods you’re using for rewards, don’t forget to include the cost of picking, packing, and shipping. Depending on the state you’re in, you may be responsible for taxes on the pledges you collect, and you’d better plan for it because when Uncle Sam holds out his hand, he expects to be paid.”

Shadowrun Returns reached its funding goal after 28 hours, which caused Gitelman and his team to get a little too excited. They released a quick follow-up video in response, mentioning the possible addition of multiplayer and cooperative modes.

“The level of excitement in the community went through the roof at the thought,” said Gitelman, “but we quickly realized that adding these additional modes was a bridge too far and would heavily distract from the single-player game we had envisioned.”

The solution? Harebrained Schemes posted a written update saying that, after a bit of thinking, it had decided those features were “beyond the scope of the project and would cause us to lose focus on the game you reacted to so positively (and the game we really want to make).”

“Backers — and potential backers — told us that this statement increased our credibility because it was transparent, direct communication and showed that we were professional game developers who knew how to focus their project,” said Gitelman.

‘Crowdfunding is a full-time job’

“People need to see something tangible — not just on launch but during the campaign,” said Roberts.

“Even with Star Citizen, where I prepared for a full year, I felt like I didn’t have enough content to share during the campaign,” he said. “If you keep your community engaged, checking in for updates and new cool stuff to see, they are more likely to tell you ways you can improve your campaign and connect with an even wider base.”

The start of the campaign was rough for Cloud Imperium. Roberts recalled how the servers for its dedicated community site, which also acted as a secondary crowdfunding platform, crashed for four days because too many people were trying to back the project.

“Today’s world has a very short attention span, and there was no doubt that we missed out capturing some backers due to the difficulties on our site,” he said. “We reengineered our site to be more robust and also added Kickstarter as an additional option for potential backers. Then we just put our heads down and worked doubly hard to provide updates and engage with the community.”

Because of the extra effort, Roberts feels that the team managed to make up for their losses by the end of the campaign.

“Maybe the biggest factor in our success was that we actively listened and tailored the campaign based on the feedback we got from our community,” he said. “Launching on Kickstarter, a lot of the additional tiers and add-ons that helped drive our fundraising total up came directly from suggestions made by our community. If your community feels like you are listening to them they back the project with incredible passion.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Correction (12/31/2012 @ 6:45 a.m.):  This article previously read that 52,000 people contributed the $79M. That is not correct. It is actually more than 520,000 backers. Before publishing, we double checked these numbers with Kickstarter. The company’s spokesperson assured us everything was accurate. That was not the case, and we apologize for providing incorrect data.

Original story:

As we punch the clock on 2012, we can safely call it the year of Kickstarter … at least for games.

After developer Double Fine (The Cave, Psychonauts) broke the crowdfunding concept wide open with its hugely successful campaign that raised over $3.45 million to produce a classic-style point-and-click adventure game (tentatively titled Double Fine Adventure), everyone wanted in on the concept. That led to the games category exploding on the site.

If you’re still somehow not aware, Kickstarter is a platform that creators can use to get funding for their projects from a lot of different people in exchange for small rewards, copies of the final product, or simply credit — and not from investors who will get a percentage of ownership in return. Inventors and creative people must pitch Kickstarter users on an idea, and then the public can contribute small (or large) sums of money if they want it to come to fruition.

We contacted Kickstarter, and a spokesperson told us that it was the crowdfunding site’s biggest year ever, and the 520,000 backers who contributed more than $79,000,000 toward game-related projects were a big part of that.

The Android-based Ouya console brings the indie-game concept to hardware. It raised over $8 million on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter in 2012 vs. Kickstarter in 2011

In 2011, Kickstarter only hosted 87 successfully funded video game projects. That number skyrocketed to 255 in 2012 — and that doesn’t even count this month in December.

The number of backers in the game category (which includes video games and tabletop games)  jumped from 45,622 in 2011 to around 52,000 in 2012, and the amount they contributed rose from a measly $3,616,530 in 2011 to nearly $80 million this year. Project creators must have stepped up their backer-reward game.

As popular as video games are on Kickstarter, there were even more board and card games. The site saw 385 tabletop titles successfully reach their funding.

Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 162,665 people have backed more than one project in the games category.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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We thought we were so smart back in January with our release lists and RSS feeds. We really believed we knew what was going to happen this year. “I can’t wait to play BioShock Infinite when it releases in 2012!” we said. We were so naïve back then. It doesn’t matter how closely you follow the news or how often you refresh your browser; some companies can still manage to catch the gaming public completely unaware.

Here are some of our picks for the biggest surprises of 2012.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

I hated the first Black Ops. Hated. It. I even went back and replayed parts of it just to refresh every design misstep and weak idea in my mind before its sequel arrived. You’d better believe that I’d sharpened all my knives in anticipation of carving up Black Ops II like a particularly ugly turkey who killed my dog. And then it turned out good … like, really good.

It’s as if developer Treyarch, a company that consistently churned out the worst entries in the franchise for years, suddenly ditched their old playbook and started fresh. The flow and encounters hit a sweet spot that I haven’t felt from the series since the first Modern Warfare, which came out in 2007. The branching storylines — often based on your in-game performance rather than flat yes/no answers — lock in unless you replay the entire mission … and every mission after it.

Very nice. Sure, the real-time strategy chapters don’t hold up as RTS games, and it’s still the bro-tastic Michael Bay of video games, but I can’t deny that I’m actually excited about Call of Duty again right when COD fatigue had fully set in. Can Activision deliver at this level every year? I’m still skeptical, but at least now I know that the possibility exists.

Rediscovering adventure games

Contributing editor Stephanie Carmichael

This was a momentous year for point-and-click adventure games, and Kickstarter played a huge role in that. Fans donated more than $3.3 million to Double Fine Adventure, making it one of the most successful video game campaigns on the crowdfunding service, let alone one of the greatest outpourings for the genre to date. Luminary Jane Jensen raised enough money for her Pinkerton Road Studio and the upcoming adventure game Moebius. And Telltale Games launched one of the hottest titles of 2012 with The Walking Dead. Those are only a few of the promising or excellent titles that found an audience in the past dozen months. Who said adventure games were dead?

Street Fighter X Mega Man

Contributor Samir Torres

Street Fighter and Mega Man turned 25 years old in 2012, and that calls for a celebration. Street Fighter X Mega Man is a free, PC-only, old-fashioned Mega Man adventure game in which you battle Street Fighter characters instead of Robot Masters. When you beat them, you acquire their abilities. It came out on December 17.

The most interesting part is that Capcom is working with die-hard Mega Man fans to make the title — fans whom the developer has neglected in recent years with the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man Universe and the Blue Bomber’s omission in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

The PlayStation Vita

Intern Giancarlo Valdes

Though I only bought the Vita a few weeks ago, I honestly think it’s the best handheld I’ve ever owned — with its gorgeous screen and sleek hardware design, it’s also the prettiest. Games such as Gravity Rush, PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, and Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack are great — even when I’m not commuting and just playing on the couch at home. The proprietary memory cards are still ridiculously expensive, and game-wise, the lineup doesn’t look too bright in 2013, but for now, I’m happy with just catching up with all the gems that came out this year.

Guild Wars 2

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

I quit playing World of Warcraft a few years ago because, meh, I thought the third-person fantasy massively multiplayer online genre was over, and I was tired of it. After messing about with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Eve Online, I figured that Guild Wars 2 would just be another WOW clone. Instead, it’s much more interesting and compelling to play, has many different ways to progress in the game, and made me an MMO player yet again. Not having a monthly subscription is a big factor as well.

Warlock: Master of the Arcane

Copy editor Jason Wilson

I hadn’t realized how much I had missed Master of Magic, the fantasy equivalent of Civilization from the 1990s. I didn’t realize that I had been yearning for a game like this until I encountered Warlock: Master of the Arcane. It isn’t as deep as Civilization — the focus is more on combat than in Sid Meier’s legendary turn-based strategy series — but in some ways, it’s more fun. The factions each have their own personality (I love the voices of the goblin units or the flying galleons of the Undead), and Warlock’s A.I. actually knows how to play its game. If you enjoy turn-based strategy that focuses more on combat than on expansion and empire-building — and dig fantasy — check it out.

Guild Wars 2

Intern Mike Minotti

I’m one of those MMO players. You know, the kind who plays World of Warcraft casually, sometimes tries something new, but always returns to the welcoming arms of Azeroth. I never thought I would find an MMO that I would genuinely like better than WOW, but Guild Wars 2 hooked me with its beautiful world and innovative quest systems.

The Phantom Pain/Metal Gear Solid connection

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Every year, the best part of Spike’s Video Game Awards — meaning the good part of Spike’s Video Game Awards — is all the world-premiere trailers for upcoming titles. 2012′s show was no different, and the announcement trailer for developer Moby Dick Studios’ The Phantom Pain was the highlight of the evening.

Even more interesting is the fan-driven speculation that the title is secretly the next installment in Konami’s Metal Gear franchise. The evidence is circumstantial at best, but if you think back on it, this is exactly the sort of thing that we’d expect from the stealth action series.

Dragon’s Dogma

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Capcom’s underrated action-adventure caught me completely by surprise. I’d heard nothing about it until a few weeks before release when then-Bitmob staff writer (now at PC Gamer) Omri Petitte published his “A Series of Epic Events” preview. Instantly, I saw Monster Hunter- and Dark Souls-style gameplay dancing in my head, and I wasn’t too far off once I got my hands on the disc.

Here’s a game that makes nighttime feel dangerous and isolating, not merely a moonlight-blue hued palette swap. Here’s a game with a detailed, skill-based combat model that encourages creative solutions. Here’s a game that makes exploration feel grand and of consequence such that smart preparation becomes a necessity. Here’s a game that blends asynchronous multiplayer into an experience that’s not turn-based or on a phone. Here’s a game that doesn’t waste your time with bland, boring, and ultimately useless dialogue from cardboard non-player characters. Here’s a game that’s not afraid to challenge modern design conventions and show them to be a poor way forward for the medium.

The PlayStation Vita

Intern Jasmine Rea

I was all prepared to dislike the Vita based on how woefully under-supported it was at launch and Sony’s silly choice to make a 3G-enabled model. Since I really wanted to review Persona 4 Golden, I knew I’d buy one at some point, and boy was I shocked by how much I loved it. The screen is mesmerizing, and the increased size and heft fixed all the problems that I had with the PlayStation Portable’s shape. Most of all, I didn’t mind forking over money for digital versions of PSP games that I already own. They just look so much better on that pretty screen. The Vita deserves more support, and if you like Japanese role-playing games, you’re sure to adore this flashy little handheld. Just don’t buy into the touch panel gimmicks, and I think you’ll love it, too.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare

Intern Evan Killham

Alan Wake, developer Remedy Entertainment’s Stephen King/Twin Peaks-fusion thriller with a dash of Lovecraft, was one of my favorite games of 2010. I was a little disappointed that the follow-up, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, was a bite-sized Xbox Live Arcade downloadable title, but I checked it out anyway because, hey, more Alan Wake. And you know what? It is glorious.

Remedy drops the first game’s moody tension in favor of a more action-based, grindhouse dynamic, and while such a drastic shift in tone might be the worst thing that could happen to a franchise, somehow it just works for Alan Wake. It could be because this is a series explicitly about storytelling and creativity, and as such, it can include any genre Remedy feels like throwing in there. And seemingly as a test of this hypothesis, American Nightmare is a time-travel story.

The game has three levels, and you play through them three times. You could assume that this is a clever way to reuse assets and keep the game XBLA-sized, and you would be right, but on each time through, the characters around Alan remember bits of information about their experiences in the previous loop. For example, one time through, Alan has to go out to a character’s car to retrieve an item; the next time around, she remembers that someone will need that object and has it with her when you first (second?) meet, saving you the dangerous trip outside.

It’s really clever storytelling that keeps the repetition from feeling, well, repetitive, and it also serves as a fascinating commentary on game mechanics in general. What are checkpoint restarts, after all, but a form of time travel?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Who says that time is a healer? Stainless Games certainly doesn’t think so, as it has demonstrated by lovingly digitizing Double Fine Production’s Tim Schafer for its Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter campaign, then running him over. Three times. (Check around the 3:09 mark in this video.)

Schafer’s crime? His classic point-and-click adventure, Grim Fandango, beat Stainless’ vehicular-combat game Carmageddon 2 to the number-one spot in sales, way back in 1998. Stainless co-founder Neil Barnden says it was a close thing, with Carmageddon 2 being edged out “by about 40 copies sold.”

Schafer, of course, is largely responsible for the huge wave of gaming Kickstarter campaigns we are currently seeing, since bagging a record $3.3M for the proposed “Double Fine Adventure.” The irony of this is not lost on Barnden, who remarks: “It’s a small world, but we have long memories…Tim,” before playing a clip of the digitized Schafer being pursued and knocked down.

Not content with simply running Schafer over once, his flattened image is also used to promote the $1,000 Kickstarter pledge package called “Fatal Immortality.” The reward for this level of donation is to have your likeness, or that of someone you dislike, inserted into the game as a pedestrian.

The third appearance of Schafer is on the Stainless Games website, where he is attached, rather uncomfortably, to the front grille of a dump truck.

Schafer appears to be taking the stunt in typically good humor, as it was presumably intended. When pointed via Twitter to the fact that, “there is a terrifying [flattened image] of your face on the BBC news,” Schafer replied: “Is ‘terrifying’ the British word for ‘arousing’?”

The Carmageddon: Reincarnation Kickstarter is looking for $400K and is currently on $173K after just a few days. Very much in the spirit of the original PC game, Carmageddon: Reincarnation will apparently “reintroduce the gaming world to the original free-form driving sensation, where pedestrians (and cows) equal points, and your opponents are a bunch of crazies in a twisted mix of automotive killing machines.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Kickstarter may not be the place to launch your game of your dreams. Three-fourths of video games don’t meet their funding goals, a representative for the website told us. That’s not exactly the impression we’re getting from reading the headlines on the gaming sites and blogs.

In recent months, it seems that every developer with an idea has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a game. Kickstarter is a website that gives inventors and idea people a way to pitch their concepts on the Internet and try to generate enough interest to acquire the necessary funding to make their project a reality.

At a glance, almost every one of them looks like a success story. Even skimming through some of our past stories will turn up articles about Double Fine’s Adventure shattering Kickstarter records or a mid-sized team of developers resurrecting classics like Shadowrun and Leisure Suit Larry. Of course, it may be easy to forget that Tim Schafer, Shadowrun, and Leisure Suit Larry are all well-known, well-loved names.

Far outnumbering those success stories you read about in the headlines are the games that never make the cut. Either the makers can’t develop enough hype or people just don’t care about the idea. Whatever it is, these campaigns don’t meet their funding goal.

Let’s take a look at five Kickstarter campaigns that either didn’t make it or are on track to never see the light of day.

1. Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Adventure Mysteries

This was one Sherlock Holmes adventure game fans didn’t receive. It seemed heavily modeled after those mid-’90s PC adventure games with the live-action movie sequences and horrible acting — nothing wrong with that…those games have their charm.

The game had 559 backers and reached about $17,400 of their $55,000 goal. Unfortunately, it was not nearly enough to make it happen. Even after all that, David Marsh, who launched the project, thanked backers and kept a cool attitude about it. [Link]

2. Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men

This campaign’s failure was very different. It was apparently gaining momentum but was killed off with 83 backers and $4,739 of funding due to allegations that Little Monster Productions, the developer behind the game that would never be, stole assets from other studios, according to a Gamasutra report.

Little Monster Productions released a statement denying the claims, but the project was ultimately terminated.  [Link]

3. Quest: Remnants of Chaos

Quest: Remnants of Chaos is what the developers describe as “A new dynamic MMORPG [massively multiplayer online role-playing game].” Behind the project is TNT Games, with team lead Ted “Viking” Vincent and his two buddies, the “Father of Dark Elves” and “Ghizmo Geke.” Yeah, their mugs say it all.

Ted “Viking” Vincent (Top) leads TNT Games with the “Father of Dark Elves” (left) and “Ghizmo Geke” (Right)

They have three backers as of the time of this writing, and while I will try refrain from being overly critical, the quality of their pitch video isn’t doing them any favors. The project seems very ambitious, and even with half a million dollars (of which they have only reached $155 between three backers and have roughly a month left to make up the rest), it seems it will be very difficult to pull off something of that scale.

It just doesn’t look like it will happen. [Link]

4. Class of Heroes 2

This was one of the unlikely failures. GaijinWorks, a localization studio, and Monkey Paw Games, which has managed to bring back a handful of classics like Alundra and Chou Aniki, collaborated to bring Class of Heroes 2 for the PSP to the US. They reached $96,951 of their $500,000 goal and had 882 backers.

According to the PlayStation Lifestyle website, the studios tried, but it may have more to do with a lack of interest in the series stateside. Atlus published the first game in the U.S., and it seems that it didn’t do well enough for the publisher to justify going with the second one. Sounds like they were right. We contacted Atlus about the sales of the game but haven’t heard back. [Link]

UPDATE: MonkeyPaw Games contacted GamesBeat to inform us that they are moving forward with the title, but it will be a digital release later this year.

5. Your World

This is about as much of his game as we ever saw.

Your World is “A MMORPG Game [sic] built by gamer’s [sic], for gamer’s [sic] and funded by gamer’s [sic]. ” Yeah, that’s exactly what the Kickstarter’s page says about the title. With 109 backers and $21,345, this game didn’t even come close to meeting its whopping $1,100,000 goal.

It’s seems that the fellow behind it the project, Ellwood Bartlett, had his heart in it, but in the end, it’s just another overly ambitious project by someone who wants to make the next great thing. The good news is that he should have plenty of money because according to The Baltimore Sun, he hit the Mega Millions Jackpot in 2007 and scored about $27 million after taxes. [Link]

Kickstarter isn’t some magic solution to funding your game

Be it because the developers are aiming too high or the gaming public just has no interest in the project, some ideas don’t always work. In fact, the vast majority of Kickstarter gaming projects fail.

A Kickstarter rep told us that on average the success rate of Kickstarter projects in the video game category is about 25 percent. This is compared to an average of 44 percent success rate for Kickstarter overall. Meanwhile, board and card games see about a 44 percent success rate while only 32 percent of games as a whole reach their funding. Either way, video games are at the bottom of that list when it comes to success rate. So hold off, would-be developers, your game won’t magically happen because of Kickstarter.

Of course, if those numbers don’t deter you, go ahead and launch a Kickstarter campaign for your awesome new game. If it’s cool, maybe someone will bite. While you’re at it, check out Tim Schafer’s five tips to Kickstarter success. After all, he did break funding records. You can learn a thing or two from the master.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tim Schafer believes Double Fine’s success on Kickstarter is repeatable as long as developers deliver capable and profound pitches that speak to their audience. Schafer revealed five tips to help hopeful developers make the most out of their Kickstarter plans in an interview with IndieDB.

“We asked for $400,000. $300,000 for the game and $100,000 for the documentary,” Schafer told IndieDB. “We ended up hitting our goal in the first night.” Double Fine ultimately raised over $3 million — and a whopping third of that the night the project went live. Schafer believes other companies will have similar success (but probably not Kickstarter record-breaking success) by taking these five tips to heart:

1. Prove the game has to be made

2. Prove the game has to be made a certain way

3. Prove your team is the one-and-only team to make it

4. Prove it’s critical that this game is made now

5. Prove it’s more than a game, it’s a significant event, and fans need to be apart of it.

The path to true Kickstarter success is believing in your product and not assuming people will want to pay you to finish it. Writing a solid pitch that excites backers and shows your dedication to the project is the way to succeed.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Campaign: Pinkerton Road Studios
Current status: $63,367 pledged of $300,000 goal
Jane Jensen, creator of the acclaimed Gabriel Knight adventure series, wants her idyllic farmstead in Lancaster County, Penn., turned into “a remote outpost of gamedom.” Along with husband and game producer Robert Holmes, Jensen hopes for a successful shakedown run of “Community Supported Gaming” – a term (coined by Jensen) aptly summarizing the Kickstarter craze – before embarking on three potential full-length adventure titles. “The casual game market is ready for meatier fare, and the hardcore audience is nostalgic for games like these,” Jensen said in a recent press release.

Campaign: Make Leisure Suit Larry come again
Original game: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
Current status: $191,900 pledged of $500,000 goal
The premise of the Leisure Suit Larry adventure series hangs in left field at first glance: Players control the balding, double entendre-speaking, 40-something Larry in his pursuit for (unsuccessfully) seducing attractive women.  Beyond the camp and alliterative affinity, however, lies a franchise adored by fans for its snappily coarse humor. Series creator Al Lowe  joined forces with current rights-holder Replay Games with plans to recreate the first seven games for mobile devices using updated graphics and a modern interface.

Campaign: Shadowrun Returns
Original game: Shadowrun
Current status: $504,331 pledged of $400,000 goal
As one of the most popular pen-and-paper role-playing games around, Shadowrun scores major geek cred for combining aspects of the cyberpunk, fantasy, and mystery genres. Only 28 hours transpired before the fundraiser hit its goal, and Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman and mobile developer Harebrained Schemes (Crimson Steam Pirates) are forging ahead with a 2D turn-based title set in the Shadowrun universe.

“Crowdsourcing to fund creative content represents truly profound change to the status quo,” Harebrained’s Kickstarter entry reads. “While we watch financial models for the creation and distribution of creative content continue to erode, Kickstarter charts a direction for how fans can directly impact development of creative content they want by funding its creation.”

Campaign: The Banner Saga
Current status: $392,312 pledged of $100,000 goal
Composed by a trio of artists and designers whose latest accomplishment was the blockbuster massively multiplayer Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Banner Saga “throws you into the end of the world” and tests your mettle against gorgeously bearded men and lithe spearwives in a turn-based tactical RPG. Developer Stoic’s art direction strikes a richly colored motif inspired by Viking and medieval fantasy themes. Best of all? Both the PC and Mac versions of the game will release sans troublesome digital rights management systems.

Campaign: Takedown
Current status: $221,833 pledged of $200,000 goal
Sure, modern military shooters pepper the industry like spent bullet casings, but Takedown’s burgeoning presence promises something a little different. Hailed as a spiritual successor to staple tactical shooter franchises such as Rainbow Six and SWAT, Takedown emphasizes careful planning and execution versus run-and-gun. The game’s setting places a team of private military contractors – that’s “mercenaries” for the rest of us – under your control taking on hostage rescues, target eliminations, and stealthy search-and-destroy missions.

Campaign: Wasteland 2
Original game: Wasteland
Current status: $2 million pledged of $900,000 goal
Designer Brian Fargo’s track record reads like a sermon from the RPG gamer’s bible. His company, Interplay, gave gamers such revered series as The Bard’s Tale, Descent, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and Wasteland. The latter – a post-nuclear-apocalypse survival title that served as the framework for Fallout – is receiving a well-deserved sequel after reaching its target funding amount in just two days. Now with inXile Entertainment (Hunted: The Demon’s Forge), Fargo promises a game “worthy to be a Wasteland sequel, as challenging and rewarding as the original, with all added capacity and dazzle of games today.”

Campaign: Double Fine Adventure
Current status: $3.3 million pledged of $400,000 goal
The one that started it all shattered previous Kickstarter milestones, narrowly missing becoming the first project in the website’s history to hit $1 million in pledges by just 24 hours (ElevationLab’s iPhone dock got there first). Still, reaching a staggering 834 percent donation rate probably caused at least a few gleeful grins at the end-of-week meeting. What’s next for Double Fine? After prophesying that lightning certainly strikes twice — or thrice, or even seven times — Schafer and pals will spend the next six to eight months fashioning a new point-and-click adventure game for mobile devices, PC, and Mac.

What do you think of the surging popularity of crowdfunded games and the meteoric rise of Kickstarter as a bastion of retro revivals? Leave your comments below.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With less than six hours left on the clock, Double Fine is already celebrating more than $3M in Kickstarter funding for its Double Fine Adventure. Double Fine Adventure was the second Kickstarter campaign to ever reach $1M, though it did so considerably faster at just under 24 hours.

At 3pm PST today, Double Fine will be hosting a livestream counting down the final moments of the record-breaking campaign. An update was posted urging users to watch the livestream rather than repeatedly refreshing the Kickstarter page on their own computers, as there are concerns the site could crash (again).

To those of you who have backed the project, thank you so much! We’ll see you soon on the backer forums!

To those of you who haven’t yet backed the project, there’s still time! Many of these rewards will only be made available to backers, so act now if you don’t want to miss out. We’ve been hearing from a lot of folks that would like to back the project, but are unable to do so because they are outside of the US and do not have a credit card. Well, here’s Tim Schafer to the rescue with information on how to obtain a pre-paid credit card to back the project.

Interest in Kickstarter from game developers immediately surged as word of Double Fine’s success began to spread last month. Not coincidentally, Brian Fargo recently launched a campaign for Wasteland 2, a sequel nearly 15 years in the making, with a goal of $900,000.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Remember that time game maker Tim Schafer asked for $400,000 on Kickstarter and the world gave him $2.5 million? You might be wondering what he’s done with said riches, and how he’ll be putting them to good use. Last night Schafer provided the following images as inspiration for Cliff Bleszinksi, who took over hosting duties at this year’s Game Developers Choice Awards.

I’m not a game developer myself (yet), but as you can see, the images are more-or-less in line with the general expectation of how game studios operate.

For a deeper look at how the money will actually be spent, 2player Productions and Double Fine will be providing a documentary series on the making of Double Fine Adventure.

Images via Talia C. & Heinrich L.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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“I miss making them and I miss playing them. Because there’s a certain kind of player who doesn’t really like a lot of the games that are popular now,” he said.

As a writer and programmer for LucasArts in the 1990s, Schafer was responsible for co-designing some of the genre’s most well-regarded titles, including Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and The Secret of Monkey Island. However, in an industry currently dominated by first-person shooters like Call of Duty, he says it’s hard to get publishers to take a risk on a more thoughtful, slower-paced game.

“They’re just looking at the numbers. They’re just looking at how much those games have typically sold and how much they could make if they did something like a shooter, and I think the numbers just don’t make sense for them.”

So for his latest title, temporarily-named Double Fine Adventure, Schafer turned to crowd-funding website Kickstarter and his loyal fan base for help. His goal was to raise $400,000, a modest number for a modern day video game budget. Not only was the project fully funded in just over 8 hours, it raised a record-breaking $1 million by the end of the first day.

“We’ve always had really passionate and dedicated fans, but I did not expect this kind of financial reward,” Schafer said. “I really thought that we might make our goal of $400,000 by the end of the 30-day period, but when we hit a million in the first 24 hours we knew that we were on to something really unique.”

Double Fine Productions is the first major studio to finance a video game through Kickstarter and develop it in the public eye. Schafer says all of the donated money will go towards making the product bigger and better. It will now launch on multiple platforms, including PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. It will also feature voice acting and localized text in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. A documentary series filmed by 2 Player Productions will follow the Double Fine team as they work on the project and will be available to backers.

“They’ll get to see our brainstorming sessions. We’re going to get people together and do like we did in the old days, just sit in a room and talk about anything we want to talk about until we come up with a couple of puzzles each day. We’ll let people see that. And they’ll see what the artists are drawing, the kind of thought process we go into when we’re shooting, what character designs we like. We want to make them feel as much as possible like they’re here in the office sharing in the game development process with us.”

Schafer says his team is not nervous about the thought of cameras following their every move, having already taped an episode of G4 TV’s Icons during the crunch period for the 2005 3D platformer Psychonauts. “That was really revealing. We had some people complaining about how hard the work was. Some people were sleeping on the couch. We’ve opened our doors to cameras before, but this is really the first time people are going to see the beginning of the creative process, not just the painful conclusion.”

With the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter project now past the $2 million mark, many have questioned whether or not its success will change the way video games get published. Developers like Obsidian Entertainment’s Chris Avellone and InExile Entertainment’s Brian Fargo are now toying with the idea of launching crowd-funding campaigns of their own. Schafer sees it as a good thing.

“I think people have asked, ‘Is this a game changer? Is this going to revolutionize game production? Are the publishers doomed?’ And I don’t think it’s that extreme, but I also think when people dismiss it as just a one-off deal that only Double Fine could have done — and it only could be done once — I think that’s not true either,” he said. “I think as long as someone else comes up with a similar story, whether it’s a game or not — just the right project, the right person making it, the right time, and a reason why only something like Kickstarter could fund it — I think you could have another explosive funding project on your hands.”

“I think it’s a great way for a lot of projects, games or not games, to be made whenever the ‘gatekeepers’ — the big companies that decide what gets made and what doesn’t get made — are not serving certain segments of the fan base,” he added. “And enough of those fans can use the Internet to coordinate and kind of pool their resources. They can make it happen for themselves instead of waiting for these gatekeepers to do it.”

Schafer says it’s the relationship between creators and backers that makes the Kickstarter process interesting. “Instead of making a game and risking all your money and hoping the fans show up, here the fans are showing up at the beginning. So the risk is over and they’re paying for the game in advance, essentially. And what that requires is just a lot of trust and faith that we’ve built up doing this for 10 years with Double Fine and 10 years before that with LucasArts. Hopefully, we’ve built up enough trust where they feel like I’m gonna do my best to deliver something worthwhile to them.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tim Schafer has changed the rules for funding major game projects. Now he is making good on his promise to communicate status updates directly to his fan base.

After collecting more than $1.8 million in crowd-sourced Kickstarter funding for a new videogame, Double Fine Studios founder Tim Schafer has published a video update for the “backers of adventure”. He reveals that the game will be released for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, as well as the mobile platforms iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android.

The increased budget will pay for English voiceovers and translations of the on-screen text into French, Italian, German and Spanish. Schafer also announced that backers of the project will be able to get a version of the final game, which is completely free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection. Access to beta versions prior to release will be made available on the Steam network only.

Details about new high-profile video games still under development are usually shrouded in secrecy, with new information carefully trickled through PR channels. But Schafer has promised “an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form” and it will be interesting to follow future public announcements about the game’s progress.

Fans of Schafer’s body of work have also been hoping for a sequel to his 2005 action-adventure Psychonauts. In a recent Twitter exchange with Schafer, Minecraft programmer Markus “Notch” Persson expressed his interest in helping to fund the project. But in a new post on his personal blog, Persson clarified that he has “NO idea if this is actually going to happen.” The budget for Psychonauts 2 would be three times higher than he had originally anticipated. According to Kotaku, it would be in the range of $13 million.

Persson is hoping to meet Schafer during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in early March for further discussions. But he points out that “Double Fine will be very busy for many months with the Kickstarter project” and wishes “Stop hyping over this, internet!” (good luck with that).

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Updated at 4:30pm PST for record $1 million amount.

Earlier this week, crowd-funding site Kickstarter set a new record when the Elevation iPhone Dock became the first project to close in on the $1 million dollar mark. But that milestone has officially been bested. In its first 24 hours, gaming studio Double Fine Adventure’s Kickstarter project has raised more than $1 million and it shows no signs of slowing down.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer tweeted the above photo of the Double Fine team celebrating the $1 million mark.

As GamesBeat reported yesterday, Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert are legendary game-makers from the golden age of PC gaming, having created classic LucasArts adventures such as Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandando.

But in the era of Angry Birds, publishers weren’t willing to take a risk on a new project from the duo. As Schafer put it in the Kickstarter video, publishers would laugh in his face if he asked for the funds to do an old-school adventure game. But legions of fans are always asking for it, and offering to pay. So they turned to Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 and offer fans a chance to watch the creative process, pitch in ideas, and even star as characters in the game.

“There’s an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside,” Schafer said. “Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.”

The incredible response to the project is going to give Double Fine a lot more leeway in how it crafts the game. “Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!” the team wrote in an update after passing its goal by a wide margin.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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