Chris Taylor on the Brink, Wildman Interview
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(I've been doing this a long time,) he offers wearily, boisterous presence almost shrinking. (I've been fighting on the field for 15 years as an independent developer. I don't want to sell my soul. I've turned down all these opportunities to do it, and it wasn't exactly to the devil, but it wasn't a golden ticket either. I knew if I sold, I'd probably be shut down in three-to-five years. I didn't want that. I want Gas Powered Games to go on for decades. So I've been fighting and fighting and fighting.)
Very recently, however, he has won a few small victories. Wildman may not be garnering the interest it needs from fans, but the (evolutionary) RTS-RPG's attracted attention from a few friends in high places.
(We've gotten a lot of phone calls from people who are interested in publishing Wildman,) says Taylor. (But they would love to see us raise the money on Kickstarter, and then they'll take us the rest of the way. So we still need to fund it, but it probably means we won't have $1.1 million minus the fees. We'll have $2 or $3 million, at least. So we have an opportunity here to actually make a much bigger and better game if the fans vote yes in the first place.)
But with less than a week to go, that initial hill's looking more and more like Mt Everest every day. He admits that previous Kickstarters have rallied to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in their final hours, but he also has serious doubts about Wildman's ability to manage a repeat performance. In fact, it's why the whole layoff fiasco happened in the first place.
(The numbers were not there,) he insists, eyes shifting downward. (They weren't even close. 75K on the first day. Other comparable Kickstarters have done 300k, 700k. Feargus and Obsidian made their goal in 24 hours. We were off by over an order of magnitude.)
(So a friend with way more experience in this business than me 30 years said, '˜You've got to shut the Kickstarter down. It's gonna leak that you did the layoffs, and people are gonna wonder why the Kickstarter's still going.' But another friend of mine made a really impassioned point to me. He said, '˜You know, the people who backed you are going to be super upset. They're gonna be pissed about this.')
(I decided to do a video and let them decide. That's where all of this came from. There was no master plan. It was just in the moment. I could never, ever, ever calculate something like this.)
