Chris Taylor’s troubled Wildman Kickstarter has been cancelled with only a few days until its original deadline, and with only $500,000 pledged of the $1.1 million goal.
With five days to go till the end of its Kickstarter campaign and still yet to raise of its target funds, Gas Powered Games' Wildman is in dire straits.
Chris Taylor knows he and his company have survived worse moments than this one. But it sure doesn’t feel that way.
He can tell you stories about being millions of dollars in the hole, and dipping deeply into his own personal line of credit to keep Gas Powered Games alive and to make payroll. There have been times when they had debt and no projects and no publishers. There have been times when he’s been at serious risk of not just losing his company, but the home he shares with his family.
Chris Taylor is making a habit of this. Wrenching our hearts, I mean - pulling them this way and that, littering the ground about his feet with an Autumnal sheet of flaccid, spent organs. Er.Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Last week, Wildman looked - and still does - like the workings of a great game. An RTS-botoxed action RPG, which becomes a MOBA in multiplayer. It looked like Gas Powered Games were finally evolving their way out of their Kings and Castles-shaped rut.
Gas Powered Games, makers of Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander (among many other genre-defining games), have "laid off a substantial number of the team". In a video update on Kickstarter the studio's head Chris Taylor says this is because "if [he] ran this team throughout the entire Kickstarter campaign, and it fails to fund, then [he] has to let everyone go, shut the company down. No one gets PTO, severance, or anything".
There are marine iguanas living on the Galapagos islands. These black lizards were once regular iguanas, but were swept downriver from South America and out to sea on rafts made of reeds. The survivors washed up on unforgiving volcanic shores, and adapted. They learned how to swim. They evolved to hold their breath for up to an hour. They developed glands in their noses to sneeze out excess sea salt.Chris Taylor isn’t sleeping well. It’s Friday, January 11th, and there are only 72 hours until Gas Powered’s first Kickstarter goes live. He and his team at Gas Powered Games are constantly second-guessing themselves and worrying about the strength of their pitch for Wildman. Are they showing too little? They have prototype assets they can use, but they worry that the low-quality will make people think Wildman is likewise low-quality. But if they only show the stuff that looks good right now, chiefly concept art, Taylor and GPG worry that people will think the project looks too narrow, or too incomplete. How do you create a pitch that leaves people satisfied, yet hungry for more?A number of times during our interview on Friday, Chris Taylor asked me if what he was saying made sense, if I “got" Wildman, his newly announced, Kickstarter-funded RTS / MOBA. Taylor talks a mile a minute and there’s always the sense that his words are trying to catch up to his brain, but more than that, Wildman is something different and harder to explain than he’s used to pitching.
