First of all, I want to say thank you to all of the people who pledged to the Kickstarter or donated via PayPal. Over $3,000 was pledged by only 60 backers, with the campaign concluding later tonight. Your pledges will be automatically returned because the Kickstarter failed to reach its funding goal, but your show of support will not be forgotten.

You probably have a lot of questions about the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade, the Kickstarter’s failure, and the future for the project. In today’s article I will address these concerns.

Why did the Kickstarter not succeed?
If you’re somebody who’s excited about the concept, this is probably the first question on your mind. Especially if you followed the response that Anarchy Arcade got during the Steam Greenlight campaign. Don’t worry too much though, because the problems with the Kickstarter are more about publicity rather than the concept. When Anarchy Arcade hits Steam and is put in front of the users it will serve, it shouldn’t be such a hard sell to convince your friends to try it out.

However, you deserve an answer to this question so below I go into detail about some of the factors that contributed to the Kickstarter’s poor performance.

First it is because I could not generate enough traffic to it. Second, I was unable to run the Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter campaigns concurrently, which is usually the best thing to do. And third, people seemed unclear of the different between the prototype and the Steam version.

It costs a fair amount of money to properly advertise a Kickstarter campaign, and since I have no budget to work with, the only way I was able to attract people to the Kickstarter was through news updates that I posted on a handful of free press sites. While this did generate some traffic to the Kickstarter, it was nowhere near the amount required to raise the kind of money needed to license Anarchy Arcade.

Secondly, the fact that I could not run the Valve Greenlight concurrently with the Kickstarter campaign was very damaging. During the last month of the Greenlight campaign, the Anarchy Arcade website was getting over 10,000 unique visitors per month. As soon as the Greenlight concluded, the traffic fell to about 5,000 a month, even though I was still promoting Anarchy Arcade via Kickstarter and my free press outlets.

The reason I could not run the Greenlight and Kickstarter at the same time is because I had to negotiate a licensing price for the Source engine before I could attempt to raise the funds for it and Valve is notorious for ignoring indie developers’ emails about licensing the Source engine. Such was the case for me; however, I was told rising to the top of Steam Greenlight and getting approved would cause Valve to initiate negotiations, so that is the order in which I had to run the campaigns.

An unfortunate order, but attempting to raise the retail price for licensing the Source engine (without negotiating a deal first) would have been truly an astronomical amount of money to attempt to raise on Kickstarter. However, now I am greenlit to be distributed on Steam one way or another, so the campaigns were not run at a total loss.

The third issue is there was some confusion between the public prototype that you can play right now vs the full Steam version that will be released later this year. It’s going to take another solid year of around-the-clock work to make Anarchy Arcade a reality. The Steam version will be a polished, easy-to-use, user experience that is powered by the same technology demonstrated in the playable prototype.

The confusion came from people assuming the prototype itself was the finished version of Anarchy Arcade. Putting more emphasis on the work to come and the improvements it will bring would probably have cleared up some of this confusion.

Anarchy Arcade’s Steam Version
As always, the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade is a gaming-focused multiplayer virtual arcade experience that is so adaptive and useful that you can use it as a personal 3D desktop. It is deeply intertwined with your Steam gaming profile, Steam friends, and the Steam community in general. In this sense, it’s like a 3D virtual reality mode for Steam itself.

Anarchy Arcade is something that you will constantly have running because it will be your preferred way to interface with your entertainment PC. It does not lag you down and will go into sleep mode while you play your other games.

It will turn your gaming computer and the media collection on it into a virtual showcase for yourself, your friends that visit you in real life, as well as all of your internet friends that visit you in VR multiplayer.

Future Development
Anarchy Arcade’s Kickstarter campaign has failed to raise the budget needed to complete Anarchy Arcade as originally planned. I have already put about three years of research & development into this project, personally taking all of the time and cost of development onto my own shoulders thus far.

Starving while I work for free is fine with me as long as I have the chance to sell my game at the end and try to make my money back. Unfortunately, if I do not have a Source engine license, I cannot sell my game and cannot make any money off of it. This means that all of the time & effort that I put into developing Anarchy Arcade would be at a complete loss.

Since I’ve already invested so much time and effort into developing Anarchy Arcade thus far, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it die just one year away from release; especially since I’ve already been Greenlit for distribution on Steam.

So it looks like I’ll be a starving artist/programmer for one more year as I complete a slimmed-down version of Anarchy Arcade and release it on Steam.

Slimmed-Down Development
I have no development budget, so I can’t pay any artists or coders to help out, so I’m basically going to have to complete the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade by myself. Also, I need to eat, and since developing Anarchy Arcade is not an investment (because I can’t sell it at the end), I need to spend more time earning money working on non-Anarchy-Arcade-related things. All of these issues mean I will be extremely pressed for time.

The challenge is to slim-down Anarchy Arcade’s development plans without cutting so much stuff out that the concept becomes useless. Also, it is still possible that I could find private investors down the road, so it is important that any design changes I make do not cripple the concept should it get funded half-way through this final year of development.

So I have decided to cut-out most of the artwork (3d models, material shaders, high detailed maps) in favor of focusing my time & effort towards the back-end programming of Anarchy Arcade. All the Steamworks features and gameplay elements will remain, but there will only be a handful of maps and low-quality art assets to go with them.

The framework for Anarchy Arcade’s original design will be implemented, but it will not be fleshed out to create a fully-polished, commercial-quality experience. However, should Anarchy Arcade somehow acquire funding or suddenly gain publicity, this solid framework will be in-place to deliver the full potential of Anarchy Arcade’s original design.

Prototype Is Now Obsolete
The last two months I have shifted away from developing the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade in order to promote the Kickstarter with news articles and updates to the playable prototype. However, now that the crowd funding campaigns have concluded, I will be going back to work on the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade.

The prototype is NOT a “demo” of the Steam version, but is merely something I can quickly implement test versions of ideas in to see how they workout. This means I have to choose between working on prototype updates or working on the Steam version of Anarchy Arcade itself. It made sense to focus on the prototype updates during the fund raising campaigns, but now it’s time to get back to work on the Steam version; that’s where it’s all at.

As of today, the prototype is obsolete and will not be receiving any more updates besides minor bug fixes & maintenance. I will continue running the prototype’s servers until there is a playable build of the Steam version, but eventually the prototype will be completely retired. But prototype users, have no fear! Before the prototype is retired, I will release an update that will help you export your prototype arcades into the Steam version.

The Long Hard Road Ahead
If you’re a prototype user or just a supporter of Anarchy Arcade, this article might be a sort of downer to you. But cheer up! The Steam version of Anarchy Arcade is still on its way and will be leaps & bounds ahead of the prototype. There’s still tons of awesome features planned that I am working on implementing right now! Plus the prototype still works as good as ever, so you can keep enjoying that!

To continue following development, you can join the thousands of people who favorited the Greenlight Profile to receive updates as soon as they are released, track my personal Blog, follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or keep an eye on my YouTube channel.

Also, every Wednesday I stream live onto Twitch.tv/AnarchyArcade all-day-long as I take a break from developing to enjoy a variety of games, music, movies, and videos.

Sometimes during the week I’ll stream myself working on Anarchy Arcade’s development too, so be sure to follow my Twitch channel if you want to be notified when I’m working on some code, art, or flow charts live on-stream.

I will be going back into my code-monkey cage as I shift focus away from the prototype back onto the Steam version. But as always, if you have any questions or need any help, just let me know. Party on!