Chaos Interactive has announced that the 250,000 GBP KickStarter campaign for Seldon Crisis has begun. Seldon Crisis is described as a sci-fi themed, sandbox MMO with a story penned by novelist Riccardo Simone, a fan of Isaac Asminov. Chaos Interactive has thirty days to raise the needed capital to fund the project.
We come to Kickstarter because we have done everything we could do by ourselves. We believe that only the players themselves can help us to perform such an incredible and challenging task. The game we wish to create is harsh and unforgiving, so it is not made for everybody. From a marketing perspective we are aware that a large part of potential customers will not be interested in this, so a publisher would never support us. Instead we are trying create something fresh, unique and different, something daring that nobody ever tried. We will bring to life the Isaac Asimov foundation cycle universe in the form of a sci-fi sandbox game: A unique reality shared by all players. The game will neither be sharded nor instanced and instead simulate a dynamic economy with politics created by the players themselves all in one persistent universe.
Projects like this can be hard to realize in a big software house, where reaching a wide audience is a priority. We think that this is one of the reasons why parts of the game industry are stagnating. There was an age when a single person or small groups with great ideas emerged and created the history of online gaming, people like Richard Garriot (Ultima Online). They were able to let their creativity roam free and turn their ideas into reality.
We believe that thanks to the crowd funding model and the gaming community at large this age is returning. We will not water down the gameplay for the sole purpose of enlarging the player base to maximize short term profits. Crowd funding is giving freedom back to the developers, so they can create the games after their own vision with a player base that directly supports it.
Find out more on the Seldon Crisis KickStarter page.
