Wildman: publishers keen, but only if Kickstarter succeeds

Wildman has attracted the attention of publishers keen to back the project - but only if its crowdfunding is successful enough to demonstrate sufficient interest.

“We’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from people who are interested in publishing Wildman,” Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor told Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

“But they would love to see us raise the money on Kickstarter, and then they’ll take us the rest of the way."

Taylor said Gas Powered Games would have up to $3 million in total at its disposal should a publisher sign on after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Unfortunately, Wildman's Kickstarter is not going well. With only five days left on the clock, it has raised just $476,000 of its $1.1 million goal. Taylor knew early on he couldn't count on crowd-funding, which is why he chose to issue lay-offs before he ran out of money for severance payments.

"The numbers were not there. They weren’t even close. 75K on the first day. Other comparable Kickstarters have done 300k, 700k," he said.

"Feargus [Urquhart, CEO] and Obsidian made their goal in 24 hours. We were off by over an order of magnitude.”

Wildman is an action RPG with RTS elements. If it is not successfully funded, Gas Powered Games will close. The developer has had a hard run of it lately, with a bunch of canned projects, and it makes no money from back catalogue sales.

Gas Powered Games releases include Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, Demigod and much of the content of Age of Empires Online.