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2012: The year of the MMO Kickstarter
Kickstarter is perhaps the biggest story in the world of gaming since the birth of the home video console or the integration of online components into consumer entertainment. No new product, innovation, or invention has carried with it such immense potential for shifting the way the industry plans, builds, and delivers its products. And with projects covering everything from hardware to companion apps, it's almost impossible now to imagine a gaming world without Kickstarter, even though it was our reality just a few short months ago. The legacy of Kickstarter is one that we're witnessing in real-time. Most of the major successful projects are slated for late 2013/early 2014 releases, giving us plenty of time to speculate on what may or may not go wrong with the crowd-funding model and the products it bears. Over the next year, games will either make it to market or they won't. Developers will squander their budgets or release on time. It's all up in the air. With that in mind, we thought now would be a good time to look back on some of the biggest MMO Kickstarter projects of 2012. The fate of some of these titles is inexorably tied to the fate of Kickstarter as a viable game-creating platform -- and maybe even crowd-sourcing as a whole.
Rise and Shiny recap: Free Realms
I remember when Free Realms was announced and when Laralyn McWilliams showed off a peeing puppy, in real-time, at Fan Faire. Everyone was excited for the new game and world -- even hardened raiders and roleplayers. The demo was just cool-looking and had a very unique feel to it. Most gamers' only experiences with a social or "real-life"-style game were with Second Life, and those experiences were often tainted by run-ins with 40-something-year-old bondage fans. My experience was slightly more broad. I spent a lot of my earlier MMO years within games like There, Second Life, Furcadia and a few others. While I was not a fan of some of the stranger people who frequented these games, I loved the idea of a game that allowed players to just hang out, to live in a virtual world, and to form relationships. My first experience with disabled players was through There, and ever since then I have looked at MMOs differently. So when Free Realms was announced and released, I looked forward to spending time in a game that revisited that style of "living" in a game world. Over the last week, I decided to peek back into the world to see how it has been holding up. Click past the cut to find out how it worked out!
