Towns Kickstarter Cancellation

Thanks go to Bluesnews for the following news about another kickstarter called Towns. Seems the developer has cancelled development due to lack of funds.

This seems to be one of the major problems with kickstarters, and makes me wonder if new laws need to be passed to regulate crowd-funding.

Though that brings more problems with it also.

Towns Dev Leaving; Towns 2 Possible

The Towns forums have another situation where Early Access has not gone well, as developer Florian "Moebius" Frankenberger announces he's leaving the project, even though many of the issues that have plagued the city builder since its 2012 Early Access launch remain unaddressed (thanks Strategy Informer). He explains that he was working for a percentage of the game's proceeds, so as sales have dwindled, so has his salary, leaving him unable to continue. He offers a ray of light for fans, explaining that a sequel is possible, and making it sound like there would be some sort of discount for Towns backers if that project comes to be. He explains the advantages they would enjoy from a fresh start:

A new game will give us the following advantages:

• we can implement all the cool things that are not possible at the moment due to how the core mechanics works in Towns 1
• we can also rise attention as this is a completely new game and a successor for once great runnning game
• this will also make it possible to have a financially sound basis for a long development of Towns2

I want to end this post by thanking you for reading this and for all your support in these two months. Again I'm sorry that we had to pull the plug right here, but I sincerely hope you can understand why we had to make that decision right now.

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Link - http://www.bluesnews.com/s/151311/towns-dev-leaving-towns-2-possible
Link - http://www.townsgame.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11480
Link - http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/28066/towns-developer-quits-troubled-project

Update: Thanks to daveyd for spotting this as it should be Early Access not Kickstarter. I still stand by what I said about regulation though. It is needed and before I get flack I'm a big supporter of the platform.

Couchpotato said:

Thanks go to Bluesnews for the following news about another kickstarter called Towns. Seems the developer has cancelled development due to lack of funds.

This seems to be one of the major problems with kickstarters, and makes me wonder if new laws need to be passed to regulate crowd-funding.

Though that brings more problems with it also.
Link - http://www.bluesnews.com/s/151311/towns-dev-leaving-towns-2-possible
Link - http://www.townsgame.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11480
Link - http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/28066/towns-developer-quits-troubled-project

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Actually Couch, as far as I can tell, this game never had a Kickstarter campaign. Towns was one of the first games to be Greenlit on Steam and then sold 200K copies in a beta state (essentially "Early Access" but before that was officially a thing on Steam). From what I've seen in comments on articles the game is playable in its current state and some even enjoy it, it's just that it remains unfinished as a lot of the promised features were never implemented. So this case isn't really an issue with crowd-funding so much as Steam's Early Access model (although of course the same thing can and probably has already happened with Kickstarted games).

I don't know if we need crowd-funding specific laws, potential backers just need to exercise more caution in the projects we choose to back... If what the developers are proposing sounds too ambitious (taking into consideration of how far along they are in development, their experience, and the amount they're asking for) we should be skeptical. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is... Unfortunately game development takes more than great ideas or there would probably be a lot more great games out there.

While I agree caveat emptor should always be in effect, I am glad to see governments, like the recent Washington state lawsuit (link), at least trying to protect its citizens from greed of this sort. For Towns, its harder to determine if more should be done since there is something to show for the work.

If the users have gotten some access then good faith effort seems to have been applied and its more debatable. The lawsuit I referred to sounds more cut and dry and they should pursue him to the extent they can.

figment said:

While I agree caveat emptor should always be in effect, I am glad to see governments, like the recent Washington state lawsuit (link), at least trying to protect its citizens from greed of this sort. For Towns, its harder to determine if more should be done since there is something to show for the work.

If the users have gotten some access then good faith effort seems to have been applied and its more debatable. The lawsuit I referred to sounds more cut and dry and they should pursue him to the extent they can.

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Oh yeah, definitely agree with you in that case because as I understand it the creator never sent the backers anything... and looking at the KS campaign, the last (backer only) update was in July. In crowdfunding campaigns where it's clear that the creator did not make a sincere effort to deliver on their promises, I think legal action is appropriate.

On the other hand, I just don't want to see it get to the point where say people with the best of intentions to deliver on an ambitious / innovative project are afraid to seek crowd-funding for fear of being sued if people aren't thrilled with their end product. It would be a real shame if smaller indie game developers gave up on their dream game because they can't afford a team of lawyers to protect them from potentially being sued for a shipping a game that didn't get good enough reviews... or something like that.

I think Towns 2 is a pipe dream. They dropped the ball big time with the first game and did an outstanding job pissing off costumers. The game is pretty well known for being massively disappointing so they'd have a ton of damage control to do to in order launch a second project.

This seems to be one of the major problems with kickstarters, and makes me wonder if new laws need to be passed to regulate crowd-funding.

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The Kickstarter pages have a risks section down at the bottom. I suspect that it is a requirement. But in general it's probably best just to view all of these efforts as a type of gambling; statistics show that 50% of startup businesses fail, so the Kickstarter failures are just representative of that fact.