Successfully Kickstarted sword fighting game Clang is scrapped

Sword fighting game Clang will now not be released, despite being successfully Kickstarted in 2012.

Creator Neal Stephenson hit the pause button” on development a year ago, despite the fact the game had long passed its $500k Kickstarter goal, raising $526,125.

Now the project has been cancelled outright.

Last year, Subutai Corporation delivered the Clang prototype and the other donor rewards as promised,” Stephenson said. The prototype was technically innovative, but it wasn’t very fun to play. This is for various reasons. Some of these were beyond our control. Others are my responsibility in that I probably focused too much on historical accuracy and not enough on making it sufficiently fun to attract additional investment.

Members of the team made large personal contributions of time and money to the project before, during, and after the Kickstarter phase. Some members, when all is said and done, absorbed significant financial losses. I am one of them; that has been my way of taking responsibility for this. In the end, however, additional fundraising efforts failed and forced the team to cut their losses and disband in search of steady work.

I have delayed talking publicly about these projects for a long time because I kept thinking that at least one of them would reach a point where I could describe it in something other than generalities. I apologize for that delay. But now a year has passed since the last update and I’ve decided that it’s cleaner and simpler to cut the cord, and announce the termination of Clang.”

He went on to confirm that a handful of refunds have been issued, but falls short of promising refunds for any new requests.

By combing through comment threads and emails we have identified around two dozen Clang backers who have asked for refunds. Those have already been processed; those people have their money back (about $700 altogether),” he said.

We think that is within the normal scope of a Kickstarter project and we don’t think it sets any precedents that would give other organizations misgivings about using Kickstarter to fund their projects in the future.”