Peter

The brilliant thing about this way of funding a project is that if a goal is not met, the backers get their money back. If the goal is say 250.000 then the work will only commence if this financial goal is met. In addition to this, it serves as a brilliant indicator for how much interest there is for any given project. But as I've said before, I still think there is a limited window of opportunity for this to work, the novelty factor is starting to go away and a few years from now no game or tech sites are gonna write about games being funded this way. I'm not an expert in open source etc, so forgive me if I'm incorrect, but wouldn't it be possible to branch of the project and use crowd funding to develop the branch further while the "original" keeps being developed the old fashioned way? The crowd-funded version could for instance focus more heavily on things like perfecting the on-line competitive aspect of the game etc

"Where there's a will, there's a way" is an old English proverb that I think is fitting in this case. Have a look at this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts I think there is a huge interest for this game and if only people were alowed to contribute financially to it's success.. Please think about it one more time, please..

Kickstarter is all over the media these days, practically screaming for interesting new projects. The gaming community have just discovered that it can have a say in game development and the result is a bonanza over at Kickstarter with Double Fine-studio and the recent Wasteland project being prime examples that gain instant media recognition. I think it is foolish not take advantage of this new development. I don't know much about the "behind the scenes" work of this project, but I can hardly see the requirement for a USA based bank account, address and tax regulations as a problem if such a Kickstarter project were able to generate sufficiently large funds. It would take some organization and administering to get it up and running, admittedly some effort, but if the will was there I'm sure it could be realized. The funds could even be used to set up a USA based development studio with paid developers to work on the project full time. If the concern for the current developers being out of work has supremacy over getting a quality project out in a timely fashion for all of us players to enjoy I think the very core philosophy of the project should be reevaluated. But then again I'm just another gamer with a desperate hunger for quality games in this era of bland Triple-A, releases.