Manchu wrote:
Yeah, there's no way I would pledge for this if I lived outside of the US ... I'd have to think pretty hard even if I lived in Canada. I hope Awesome Enterprises reaches out to industry contacts on this issue and maybe they can find a way to manage the price. I guess they are ultimately hamstrung by their actual current budget and slow progress on the KS.

With Shuriken raising just over $30k at 30 days in and with 15 days to go, it is clear that the project will not be funded, and so we are regretfully pulling the plug on the Kickstarter today.

It's been a heck of a ride, we've learned a lot and tried to correct and adjust for backer needs on the fly, but even making the whole project Kickstarter exclusive gave us only a small spike in backers. In the end I suspect that to actually raise all the funds for a big box game requires a large pre-existing audience, and preferably a funding goal much lower than the cost of producing the Kickstarter.

We are not sure right now what the future of Shuriken is going to be. If we had come closer to our goal, re-launching a revised campaign would look more attractive. We could add more KS exclusive components, but that of course increases the funding goal, and we could indeed cut tens of thousands out of the goal by stripping the quality of components down to the bare essentials -- but that goal would still be substantially larger than what we've managed to raise, and we'd by trying to do it with a lower-quality production. We're not ruling out the possibility of a re-launch, but right now the expense is not looking like something that makes good business sense for Awesome Enterprise.

There is certainly the possibility of an existing publisher stepping forward to pick up the game and running the kind of Kickstarter that gamers are used to -- very low funding goals and oodles of KS exclusives -- and that's another option that we as designers can pursue; however, those doors can be very hard to break into. In particular we wouldn't want to work with any company without a successful track record, and those guys make more money doing their own games or using designers with a built-in audience.

For the time being we're going to relax and recover a bit, and if we have any future news about Shuriken, we'll be sure to keep you guys updated here.

And a big and very sincere thank you to everyone who backed the Kickstarter -- we're sorry we let you down, and we greatly appreciate every moment of your support.