Human Resources, a strategy game from the same team behind Planetary Annihilation, looked cool! There were giant robots and giant monsters. Despite this, and the studio’s previous success using the service, the game’s kickstarter has tanked.
We normally don’t post about every Kickstarter that fails, but this one is a little more interesting. Uber Entertainment had experience with successful Kickstarters, having raised over $US2 million from backers. Their pitch looked cool, and was accompanied by gameplay and cinematic footage that gave people a great look at exactly what they’d be paying for.
Yet pedigree and promise counted for little when the game, having barely scratched the surface of its $US1.4 million goal, had its campaign cancelled.
The time has come to shut down the Kickstarter for Human Resources. Every Kickstarter prediction model is showing that we will come up woefully short of our goal. Running a Kickstarter is a full time job for several people. As a small indie, we can’t continue spending time and money focusing on a project that won’t get funded. We simply don’t have the human resources. #seewhatididthere
So what happens now? After we’ve spent some “recovery time,” which consists of a dark room and probably some sobbing, Nate and I will regroup and figure out what to do next. Who knows what the future holds for Human Resources? One thing is for sure, Human Resources, as pitched in this Kickstarter, is over. But we adore the world of Human Resources and will endeavour to do what we can to bring it to life in some form.
Whether it was fatigue (Planetary Annihilation only just came out), the name (Human Resources was clever in the context of the game’s universe, where humans are the resource, but not great standing alone) or just a bad month to run a Kickstarter (it’s the silly season for AAA games), like they say, the game as they pitched it “is over”.
I hope it’s not over over though. The setting for the game was great, but that art style – especially in a strategy game, of all genres – was fantastic.
Comments
25 responses to “Big Strategy Game Fails Kickstarter, Makes Giant Monsters Sad”
1.4m? Really? Possibly a bit ambitious there guys…
They raised 2 million for their last one.
Their last game was good, not to mention based off the old series Total Annihilation
They sure did! They raised 2.2m on a 900k ask for PA.
Then they had poor support for other games, underdelivered on PA and this happened. People tend to vote with their wallets.
How? What’d they fail to deliver on?
Yeah PA feels nothing like the intro videos that they had originally produced.
Playing PA now it still feels unfinished, not even fully optimised yet so I can’t even run everything on high settings. The GUI needs some much needed attention .
I like the new game idea however I wish they had fully PA first before starting a new game.
I really need to go back and play it don’t I? I’ve touched it twice since backing it for Alpha… Whoops.
Apologies just saw your post. It’s just a case of them claiming its finished, yet it barely feels like it’s out of alpha. Like Powered said, it’s nothing like they promised. Stability issues abound, opimisation is poor, the maps are bland etc. It has amazing potential but if this is the finished state? Damn…
Hmmmm. I’ll go back and have another look, but if this is the case it’s a bigger blow to kickstarters than anything else that’s happened. It’s not even a project being cancelled. Time will tell…
Maybe saying its ‘nothing’ is a bit extreme, but it does feel like it’s not the game they promised.
I would have donated if I had heard about it…
They did one article on it which is probably fair, I really wouldn’t want to see more than that for a kickstarter
i’ve got a slight grudge against Uber after they said they were going to continue support for Super Monday Night Combat after their last Kickstarter, to which they immediately abandoned, so
it’s probably the best for people who like Planetary Annihilation, because they were probably going to do the same thing to that….
A game before it’s time
I wasn’t ready to donate to this thing.
I’m one of the many backers for PA and that game is still a fair distance away from feeling complete. Didn’t sit too well that they were all ready to start a new game already without finishing PA first.
It’s possible other supporters felt this way, too.
I know I felt exactly the same way!
Yeah exactly. What the article glosses over is a lot of the comments in the Kickstarter for HR where backers from PA were expressing their many grievances of what the current state of the game is. PA isn’t bad, it’s just flat out not finished and for them to be branching out to a new game, and asking us for funding once again is just plain insulting.
This doesn’t even get into all the issues that the Monday Night Combat community has with them. There’s a lot of interesting summary articles of Uber’s history with community management and abandoning games in an unfinished state. I highly encourage people to look some of these up before giving them any more money. I think if I paid $20 for PA I’d (barely) be happy. But going in at a $50 tier makes me feel like I’ve been ripped off. At least I’m not my mate who went in for $250…
felt the same too
I wonder if they attempted to be acquired by another company in order to build the game, would seem like something right up Valve’s ally
Like how Gas Powered Games (Supreme Commander devs) tried to fund WildMan through Kickstarter, then had to be bought out by Wargaming after the Kickstarter failed?
PA under delivering probably had a lot to deal with it imo. Pedigree means nothing.
Pffft.
Do you know how many kickstarters have failed? Over 105,000 (considerably more than the 72,000 that have been successfully funded).
I liked the idea of the game, but they didn’t want to do an offline mode and came up with nonsense excuses about not doing it.
I don’t support big companies that use always online DRM, so an Indie Developer doing it is even worse.
Sad about this: Although maybe the game’s not my cuppa, I still really liked the art style.
I suspect successfully landing a kickstater is like killing it in a job interview – it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be good at what comes next. So like they say, you need a full time department of marketeers to work it….what indy can afford that? Maybe kickstarter got so big small time outfits have been shut out?.