What do you get when you combine an MMO environment and an RPG dialogue? A game that is dead as a corpse.
In doing my end-of-decade round of Kickstarter follow up stories, I came across Eminence: Xander’s Tale only to discover that the game has very recently been pronounced dead in the water. Eminence is a rather interesting sounding title; a hardcore trading card game that operates on the Yu Gi Oh! Battle City rules of letting the victor take a card from the loser. It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of £52,037 from 669 backers and launched on Android/iOS in 2017/2018. Eminence launched without the MMORPG part of the Kickstarter campaign.
Will it get there? No. Google Play shows not-so-great install numbers (100+) and the folks at Aeternia Studios posted just a couple of months ago to announce that development is no longer active on Eminence due to the simple fact that nobody wants to play it and as a result nobody wants to fund it. The Eminence domain has also been gone for an undetermined amount of time after May of 2019.
“The Kickstarter funding we raised was not anywhere near enough to finish the first version of the game. Unfortunately, unexpected events happen, we under estimated how much we needed in terms of resource to deliver the game.
So we raised additional funding from some external investors under a new company. With this new funding we were able to deliver the game for both iOS and Android.
However, the game hasn’t made the revenue we hoped to keep supporting the team. We managed to hold on to one of our devs to help support the game for bug fixes and maintenance out of good will. But eventually he too had to move on.
We haven’t given up on the game. But with no funding and resources it’s difficult to provide any support or maintenance hence the lack of updates to the builds.”
It’s a tale as old as time. Dev funds game, does not anticipate the game going over budget, and the game doesn’t see its way to completion. It happens on a daily basis in both indie development and the AAA gaming sector and is an unfortunate reality of this industry and many others.
MMO Fallout 