Kickstarter Weekends Special Report: MALICE - Metamorphosis

There’s been a reason for the lack of updates the last few weeks and I may share them with you soon but today I am compelled to do a special Kickstarter Weekend. I’m going to talk about MALICE: Metamorphosis, which is a sequel to MALICE: The Webseries which was the first KS project I talked about on this blog which led me to starting my Kickstarter Weekend posts. I’ve decided to dedicate an entire post to this one project because I have a lot to say about it [EDIT: And I had to cut a lot of it out because it was rambling, but that’s kind of an indication of my feelings on it].

However just because I’m dedicating a lot of time to MALICE doesn’t mean we can ignore what we talked about last time. So before we discuss the new project let’s revisit some older ones.

Geek Bar Chicago: Funding Successful!

Final Earnings: $44,538 ($9,750 Goal)

As it reached its goal in a day there should be little surprise to see that Geek Bar’s campaign succeeded. It will still be a while before it’s done but once building is complete I plan on spending a decent amount of my time there.

Final Fantasy VII - The Web Series: Funding Suspended!

Final Earnings: $0 ($400,000 Goal)

Whether or not this project would have reached its particularly large goal isn’t certain but sadly it never got a chance: Square Enix got KS to take the whole page down due to “Copyright Violation”. I get it: you own a copyright and you need to protect it. But man, that just seemed harsh. I mean how many fan films based on copyrighted material have been produced in history? And lately how many of them have been funded through Kickstarter? (Answer: A lot) Maybe it was the scope of the project that freaked someone out or maybe it was the fact they actually called it “Final Fantasy” rather than something more original (Inspector Spacetime learned that the hard way) but it still kind of sucks that fans were not allowed to recreate their favorite video game as a live action experience. Shit like this makes you appreciate how gracious George Lucas was when it came to Star Wars fan films.

Anyway as I understand it was the KS page that got taken down, not the whole production but without the funding there’s no way it could work out. The people behind the web series had been attempting to contact Square Enix about the situation but they gave today (September 1st) as a deadline for themselves for when they give up the whole thing and as far as I’ve heard they’ve received no response. This web series will likely never happen. In related news Final Fantasy games have kind of sucked for the last twelve years.

Chroma Squad: Funding Successful!

Final Earnings: $97,148 ($55,000 Goal)

Lately I have become suspicious of indie video game companies using crowd funding for a list of reasons (for instance, the number of companies that had to go back to ask for more money and the large amount of creators who went bankrupt even after getting more than their original goal). That said Chroma Squad is a video game about managing a Super Sentai TV show…so there was no way I wasn’t going to go crazy over it! It managed to do very well for itself, going more than forty grand over the goal, and I hope it ends up working well. Time will tell and I have to say I’m a bit more cynical about this sort of thing than I was a year ago.

Okay, enough of the flashback. A whole blog dedicated to MALICE after the jump.

Kickstarter Weekends: Malice, Star Command, Clandestine

Making begging strangers for money a respectable profession

A weird truth about me is that I am obsessed with Kickstarter. If you don’t know what Kickstarter is it’s an online crowd funding website where artist other assorted people with an idea bring that idea to the masses who in turn can pledge money to the project in sex change for some sort a gift. In a lot of cases it’s essentially an elaborate pre-order system that allows you to directly deal with the creator. All projects have a limited amount of time to reach their goal and if they don’t reach it, even if they’re down just a few dollars, they will not receive any of the money at all. It’s all very dramatic. Even celebrities, such Matthew Lillard and Eliza Dushku, have utilized it to help fund films and documentary so it’s not just a bunch of money grubbing amateurs on this site (there are some money grubbing armatures around though, I’m not gonna lie). I spend a lot of time per week simply looking up projects and tracking progress. I, however, don’t have much money so when I find a project I want to support or even just find interesting or funny most of the time I can’t afford to help them out. BUT it occurred to me that there’s more than one way to support such things. So I decided that since I have a blog where I can write whatever the hell I want I can share some of the pages I come across. Plus I know for a fact that one day I will need to use Kickstarter to fund a project of mine so hopefully if I help others with their stuff I’ll gain good karma towards my eventual funding.

Today I’ll share three projects but obviously there’s always something new wandering around the site so I think I’ll be doing this regularly, especially if people seem to respond to it. Maybe once every few weeks? Anyway check out these projects and if you think they’re something you’d like why not shoot them a pledge to help them out?

Three projects after the jump.