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Tag: Funding
Mythical Games Raises $150m In Funding
Clockwork Labs Raises $4.3 Million for MMO
Playable Worlds Raises $10 Million Series A Funding
Kickstarted MMO Edengrad Is Returning Thanks To Share Sales
Everyone’s favorite crowdfunded MMO Edengrad is coming back! Or at least that’s the plan.
For those of you not familiar with the game Edengrad, this game was Kickstarted to the tune of £41k by developer Huckleberry Games who released the title into Early Access on Steam in April 2017 and promptly stopped actively supporting it in December of the same year due to an apparent lack of funding. The servers have continued running for that time period but no active updates have been deployed in over a year and a half now.
The folks at Huckleberry Games posted a very cryptic message back in December 2018 that they were coming back, but nothing emerged until this June when Wyborcza posted some news about the company. It looks like Huckleberry has sold 1.5 million Zloty in shares, approximately $395,000 US Dollars. That money, according to the article, will go toward continuing development on Edengard as well as new titles.
“The F series issue was a very important step in the company’s history, thanks to which the company will be able to continue working on our flagship product, Edengrad, and support the development of new promising projects. companies, they believed in it and together with us they want to develop it, and in return we will provide them with new, better quality, “said president Patryk Borowski, quoted in the communiqué.
Developer Huckleberry Games has been promising updates via the Steam forums for several months now, only time will tell if they can actually come through on those statements.
Areal Is Back: Stalker Apocalypse Funding Part 2
S.T.A.L.K.E.R is back! Well, actually STALKER is back, and that is an important distinction to make. Earlier this year we saw a Kickstarter pop up for a spiritual sequel to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R franchise called Areal, by a company made up of former developers of said franchise. It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to figure out that the trailer for the game was shot in Unity, using nearly 100% stock assets from the Unity store, and that several screenshots and pieces of concept art were taken directly from Shadows of Chernobyl.
The whole controversy just got strange from then on. Rather than address the claims, West Games began blaming their criticism on everything from western bias, the information war between Ukraine and Russia, and Forbes being sold to the Chinese. They attacked news websites covering the game, and even attempted to dox trolls. Then someone at West Games thought it would be a good idea to post a letter of congratulations and support from Vladimir Putin, and not as a joke. The campaign was suspended by Kickstarter for suspicious activities, and West Games has since disappeared off the radar.
Now the game is back as STALKER Apocalypse on World Wide Funder, a crowdfunding website that seemingly popped up out of nowhere and is currently home to a library of funding efforts, all but a small handful of which are currently sitting at 0% funding. The funding website was just registered in September of this year, and incidentally has been registered anonymously through domainsbyproxy.com.
While the funding campaign goes to great lengths to differentiate between STALKER and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, likely for legal reasons, there are repeated uses of STALKER with objects that conveniently look like periods to make the logo look like an acronym.
(Source: WWF)
Star Citizen Just Won't Quit: $27 Million
Star Citizen has moves that just won’t quit, with the recent announcement that funding has surpassed twenty seven million dollars, or approximately one dinner for three at Red Lobster assuming you have a coupon. The milestone brings with it expanded development into the Banu technology. Who are the Banu?
At $23 million we dedicated additional resources to making Xi’An spacecraft a unique experience. At $27 million, we will expand that same thinking to the Banu! Starting with the merchant ship, the design team will expand Banu technology to offer players a completely different way of experiencing their universe.
So what’s next for the endless pile of money streaming into Roberts Space Industries? At $28 million, the team will add a new starter ship. At $29 million, the team will expand Squadron 42, a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and a single player game, with enhanced missions, more resources, and better design.
(Source: Roberts Space Industries)
Stargate Back: Outlook Still Bad
When the website for Stargate Worlds went down Friday for maintenance, we assumed it would take the regular day or so for the DNS change to be complete and the website to come back up. After the 12th, when the website still hadn’t come back up, viewers looked towards the SGW twitter and Facebook pages for any update on the situation. What they found, however, was a lack of any updates or information regarding the delay. SGW’s social networking tools had gone quiet.
Stargate World’s website is back up and running, but prospects are not high. Although Cheyenne received funding earlier this year, enough to pay due paychecks and cover some other costs, the company is still starving for cash. In a post regarding the downtime;
While there continues to be a lot of desire, enthusiasm and excitement about the project from our employees, investors and fans, we will not be able to provide any updates on the development of Stargate Worlds until sufficient funding is available.
I can’t say I’m surprised at all when more bad news comes out of Stargate Worlds.
Stargate Worlds Continuing Development
The little MMO that could, Stargate Worlds has gathered quite the following. Not the massive scale of Aion or World of Warcraft, but quite an impressive following. I’ve been somewhat reluctant to talk about the title because, up until this point, it appeared that the prospects for this game were bleaker than the cancelled Halo and Harry Potter MMOs. Last year the company faced lawsuits over unpaid wages, as well as the departure of some key figureheads.
Well it appears Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment will be continuing on with the Stargate ship, as according to a post on MMORPG.com, they have received funding from investors.
“Things are actually very good here right now. We received some funding commitments that will provide financing over time and allow us to move forward with development and start catching up on our past due financial obligations, including some back payroll that we paid last week.”
Unfortunately, I still can’t say I have high hopes for Stargate Worlds coming to completion. When the Executive Producer jumps ship, it’s generally a bad sign. My prediction is that, unless CME becomes acquired by a big name publisher/developer like NCSoft or Sony Online Entertainment, this ship’s going to capsize very quickly.
Stargate Worlds is currently accepting registrants for the closed beta. Check it out at: http://www.stargateworlds.com/
MMO Fallout 
