Natural Selection 2 World Championship on the cards...if fans can raise $30,000

Crowdfunding. Everybody's at it these days, and I'll tell you precisely who when the remainder of this post has successfully reached its whopping 68p target. UPDATE: thanks! Everybody's crowdfunding, but not everybody is crowdfunding an international tournament to a particularly excellent RTS/shooter . Natural Selection 2 fans want $30,000 to make a World Championship happen. Developers Unknown Worlds have already blessed the enterprise, paying for a studio in Cologne and Twitch TV promotion - that just leaves the cost of getting everyone over there. $925 has been raised so far, so there's still a fair way to go.

There are 30 days left on the fund-o-meter , with the organisers aiming to kick things off towards the end of the year. A "group round robin format" will lead to four teams of finalists, who will then be whisked away to Koln/Cologne in Germany for a live, filmed final in March 2014, with casting by "the best commentators in the NS2 community". You'll be able to watch it on the front page of Twitch.TV - providing they raise the cash to fly and host the finalists, of course.

In the event that flying 24 players and a few casters to Germany ends up costing less than $30,000, the organisers will put "every single unspent dollar" into the event prize pool". If the event sounds like your bag, you can fund the project by hurling money at the screen (or better yet by using a bank card) here .

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.