Successfully Kickstarted sword fighting game put on hold as funds dry up

Development of sword fighting game Clang has been put on hold, despite the game successfully hitting its Kickstarter target last year.

The game raised a total of $526,125 last July, just passing its $500,000 goal. The future of the title, however, remains very uncertain.

We’ve hit the pause button on further Clang development while we get the financing situation sorted out,” Subutai boss Neil Neal Stephenson said in an update on the game’s Kickstarter page – the first since April this year.

Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people’s money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime

We stretched the Kickstarter money farther than we had expected to, but securing the next round, along with constructing improvised shelters and hoarding beans, has to be our top priority for now. We hope we’ll be able to make an announcement on that front soon.

Is the Clang project dead? At what point do you put a toe tag on an indie game and call it finished? Opinions on that might vary, but in our opinion, the project doesn’t die simply because it runs out of money. We are working on Clang as an ‘evenings and weekends’ project until such time as we get funding for a more commercial-style reboot.”

Stephenson goes on to address not why the game has been paused despite reaching its target funding goal, but instead why he has found it difficult to source addition monies.

Loyal donors may be curious as to why an apparently promising game is difficult to finance. The answer has a lot to do with the current state of the video game industry,” he added.

While we have been working on Clang, two major video game publishers, THQ and LucasArts, have gone out of business. Others have fallen on hard times. The current generation of consoles is coming to the end of its life cycle. Rather than invest in innovative new titles, the still-surviving publishers tend to keep their heads down, grinding out sequels and extensions to well-worn triple-A franchises.

To a game publisher crouched in a foetal position under a blanket, Clang seems extra worrisome because it is coupled to a new hardware controller.”