The HuMn Wallet? FrackNation? David Lynch Documentary? Child’s play. Meet the real poster child for the Double Fine effect: Wasteland 2. In its origins, it’s rather similar to Double Fine, this time being a sequel to the forerunner to the Fallout games, complete with a whopping $900,000 goal, a mark that, not that long ago, only two projects in the history of Kickstarter had ever achieved. More astonishing? It’s already passed its goal and become the fourth million-dollar Kickstarter, shooting past the OOTS drive into third place, with a month to go. Double Fine itself got more of a late push than I thought was possible in its last 24 hours, setting the final mark at $3.3 million, a mark I’m fairly sure will stand for a pretty long time… by which I mean “a month or so”.
But wait, there’s more! Meet The Banner Saga, which set a lofty $100,000 goal and has already locked up two-thirds of it within the first twenty-four hours or so, with a month still to run. Even allowing for considerable slowing, I fully expect it to lock up a quarter of a million dollars. The effect of Double Fine’s ending (and possibly the launch of Wasteland) also seems to have reinvigorated FTL, which has raised an additional $40,000 in the past week; $150k once again seems in reach, and possibly more. Idle Thumbs isn’t making $30,000 goals in two hours like when it started, but it did make close to $10,000 since I last checked a week ago and could get a substantial late push in its last 48 hours.
Meanwhile, the new Elevation Dock is probably the intriguing Geode, which made nearly $200,000 in its first week-plus. The Digital Bolex raised a whopping $283,000 in its first week, but seems to have ground almost to a halt; it’ll still be one of the top ten projects in the top-heavy Design category. The HuMn Wallet should be over $200,000 by the time you read this; with two weeks still to go, it should easily be one of the top 25 projects in Kickstarter history. The ZBoard got another spurt of backing that propelled it substantially over $200,000.
The David Lynch Documentary only raised $25,000 this week, so who knows if it can even meet its current $150,000 stretch goal. What Makes a Baby has become the second-most funded project in the history of the Publishing category (that I know of). Erfworld Year of the Dwagon finished with a whopping $84,981, which does much to make it look less like a yawning chasm from Womanthology to the rest of the Comics category than it was before. Finally, Goats appears to be the newest beneficiary of the OOTS effect. It hasn’t blown away its goals, in fact it’s already hit its last 72 hours, but it has slowly and steadily climbed into the top ten projects in the Comics category, and induced Jonathan Rosenberg to restart the comic.
Money has arrived in Rich Burlew’s bank account and orders have been placed for the first few things funded by the drive itself.