Obsidian Entertainment - Initial Kickstarter Responses

Chris Avellone has posted an update about a possible Kickstarter project, having combed through the fan response on a variety of websites, including ours. Here's the entire post:

I’ve gone through all the blog responses, comments, and Twitter responses - I wanted to say thanks to you all for the idea suggestions and the support.

And just as importantly, feel free to keep them coming. I routinely check Twitter (@ChrisAvellone), Facebook, my inbox, and a number of gaming sites with similar questions (Penny Arcade, Rock/Paper/Shotgun, NMA, RPGCodex, GameBanshee, RPG Watch, Giant Bomb) in addition to this blog so while it helps if you put your comments here or in the blog below, chances are if you frequent those other sites, I’ll have a way of getting that feedback.

If you see a thread that I may have missed, feel free to suggest it (that’s where I found many of the links above).

I’ve tabulated all the current responses as of last night, and it went off to the Obsidian owners for evaluation. I can’t promise anything will come from it, but considering the outpouring of feedback here, I appreciate everyone that took the time to respond (and the detail as well).

An additional thanks to those who had enough faith in us to be supportive no matter what the project was... that was encouraging to read.

To answer some common questions:

- Pursuing Kickstarter was a question of personal interest on my part. It doesn’t guarantee that Obsidian would do a Kickstarter project. All I know I’d love to do one, and while I have games I’d love to do, I was more curious as to what you’d want to see.

- Some people asked why we would seek funding at all. In short, our cash largely stems from publisher financing. If a publisher doesn’t believe a title is worth the investment (adventure games, old school RPGs), they will not support the endeavor.

- What excited me about Double Fine is that it skirted asking the publishers and pitching to publishers in the first place and changed the pitch focus to the folks who want to play the game. They had a means of going directly to the public and asking if they’d support a project, which they did. And as a developer, getting such a reaction from fans for a seemingly "dead” genre is welcome.

- If interested in the results, the most responses concerned in order of preference (note that there’s likely bias here considering the author of the Twitter and the blog post below):

• Planescape 2/Planescape Spiritual Successor.
  
  
• An Isometric turn-based/pause RPGs in general.
  
  
• The “other” category – this fell into game suggestions and mechanics and genres that were only suggested by 1 or 2 folks. I read all of these.
  
  
• Make whatever you want, we’ll support you.

Again, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. And even if my Excel-burned-eyes are dry from tabulating responses, it’s good that there was such a strong amount of feedback in the first place.