Shards Online's Kickstarter has already reached its $50k goal
Sandbox MMO hopeful Shards Online has met its Kickstarter goal of $50,000 with 23 days still to go. Citadel Studios' first Kickstarter for the ambitious game reached only $73,401 of its $320,000 goal last June.
Project lead Derek Brinkmann dropped by the Massively comments last week to reassure potential donors and explain the thinking behind the new campaign:
I'd like to personally address the concerns about our new goal. After our previous campaign winded down, we put our heads together and created a refocused plan to get to alpha. The minimum amount we could get to alpha with was 100k. It doesn't seem like much, but we have been in active development for over a year and have already personally invested quite a bit of money into the project.
We reached out to our friends and family and found we were able to raise 50k from small investments. That gets us half of the way there. We decided that reaching out to our fans would be the best way to get the rest of the funds. The alternative was to approach angel investors which would have forced us to change the spirit of the project.
Stretch goals begin at the $60,000 mark and include emote animations, new craft skills, and a permadeath ruleset.
