The Kickstarter campaign for Seven Dragon Saga, the old-school fantasy RPG being created by veterans of SSI, has been canceled. David Klein, the president of developer TSI, announced in an update that it's had "extremely positive results" from the Kickstarter, but acknowledged that the studio didn't have enough material to entice gamers who weren't familiar with SSI's history.
The assumption that a game or series is so famous that people are automatically familiar with it is an understandable pitfall, and one I've fallen into myself from time to time. That appeared to be what TSI was banking on by emphasizing the role that founders David Shelley and Paul Murray played in the creation of SSI's classic Gold Box games. After all, everybody knows the Gold Box series, right?
Well, no. "We knew there would be a lot of you that remembered the classics or would appreciate our efforts to build a fresh RPG, but we underestimated how much new content we'd need to show in the middle of the campaign to engage people that were less familiar with the older games," Klein wrote. "We'd thought we could talk about core mechanics when it is clear that you want to actually see those mechanics in action. We need to show off more than we had ready right now. There came a point where it became more tell than show."
Seven Dragon Saga wasn't on pace to make its $450,000 goal, but it did attract fairly significant levels of attention, drawing in more than $100,000 from 1860 backers in less than two weeks. Fortunately for them and anyone else still thinking about throwing money at the game, Klein said the Kickstarter will relaunch "as soon as humanly possible," with more art, videos, and a playable demo. In the meantime, fans who want to be kept abreast of happenings can sign up for a mailing list at tsi-games.com.
