On Thursday, NeoJac Entertainment pulled the plug on the Kickstarter campaign for their new community content focused fantasy MMO, Neo's Land. With five days left in the month-long crowdfunding campaign, NeoJac had only raised CAD $15,813 of the CAD $100,000 they were looking for. The developers cited the unlikelihood of reaching their goal as one of the reasons for early termination, but focused primarily on how they had new ideas come up during the Kickstarter that they wished to implement.
I'm never happy when I see a project on Kickstarter that failed to meet its goal for any reason: I love the idea of crowdfunding and a community-driven MMO like Neo's Land seemed like a perfect fit for the platform. I was interested enough in the project that I interviewed the developers prior to the Kickstarter's launch and I followed its progress from start to this premature cancellation. The problem was that during those 26 or so days that I was following, I never pledged.
Normally if I follow a project as closely as I did this one, I'll throw them some money, whether out of interest in the finished product or because I'm a sucker for supporting independent developers. I just couldn't bring myself to pledge for this project and I started to wonder if other would-be backers had the same issues with this Kickstarter that I did. What exactly is it that turned away people from something that has a solid concept at the center?