Auditorium 2 Sings For Its Supper
Remember atmospheric, reflection-based music game curio Auditorium? Presumably, despite being received with hugs and even awards the world over, it didn't rake in quite all the readies it could have done, otherwise sequel Auditorum Duet perhaps wouldn't be Kickstarter-funded.
With three days left to go on its crowdsourcing, it's at $51,000 of its $60,000 goal, so odds of pulling it off are reasonable at this stage.
It's this sort of project which is particularly fascinating in a business sense in the wake of the Schafer'n'Fargo show: on the one hand, it's a far lesser-known name that can't rely on celebrity or nostalgia to bring in the cash, but on the other it's a smaller-scale project that needs fewer funds and therefore is more realistic on that basis. $60k means, for Auditorium Duet, a team of four working crazily for three to four months, with their own other incomes apparently able to cough up for whatever else may be required.
The game itself promises to add co-op multiplayer to the light-bending fold, with each player's actions affecting what's displayed (and sounded) on their companion's screen. With a minimum pledge of $15 required to snag a copy of the game (though $1 gets you a copy of another Cipher Prime game, Fractal), I suspect Auditorium Duet is relying heavily on existing Auditorium fans donating, as that relatively high (at least for a not too widely-known game/team) price is arguably unlikely to pick up much floating traffic.
More details (and explanatory diagrams) over here. Or in the below video, featuring a series of men sat astride a tiny motorcycle. They'd better not spend their Kickstarter earnings on more tiny motorcycles, or this whole crowdsourcing thing is off.
Oh, and devs Cipher Prime have signed up for Brian Fargo's proposed Kicking It Forward scheme, whereby they'll kindly lob 5% of their eventual profits from the game back into other Kickstarter projects. We have a word for that kind of thing round here, you know. COMMUNISM.
So 2011 was bundles and 2012 is Kickstarter. 2013 is going to see developers sleeping on the street outside your house and looking at you sadly whenever you walk by, presumably.