rgnrk: And amazingly enough, it has reached it's not so small goal already. Happy times. Amazing for a point&click adventure game, seing the problems several other great projects have had recently.
It was faster than expected, but not totally unexpected.
1) They come from Germany, where the genre has very strong roots. I saw somewhere that over 1000 of their current backers are from Germany.
2) They don't tell us what they would like to do. They show us what they have done already. That's convincing.
3) They have a very well thought campaign otherwise too. Kickstarter page is informative, video is both fun to watch and also shows exactly what the game is all about, and they even answer questions bilingually in the comment section.
4) The whole thing is very unique and hasn't really been done before.
(Okay, technically it's close to what "Jack Houston and the Necronauts" is trying to do, but since that project has really gone nowhere in the last five years, it's still unique.)
5) Having Ron Gilbert appearing in the campaign probably doesn't hurt either.
Overall, they are showing how a good campaign is done, and that there's no "Kickstarter fatigue" to speak of, if what you are presenting is good enough.
rgnrk: And then we have the unfortunate failures of several very promising projects...
Yeah. I haven't followed all those you mentioned, but have followed some, and some others you didn't mention.
In almost every case, they did something wrong.
Shakes & Fidget? Well that was a surprising failure, but they didn't show at all the real game in their video, even though the video otherwise was fun. Maybe they relied too strongly on their franchise and on the other hand the success that their partnered developer had had.
Then again, we really don't know how close they could have come to their goal, as they themselves canceled the campaign.
