GameLaunched went live last week and so far is featuring only 4 projects, but surely more will follow in the next days.
This International Crowdfunding for games platform, as they define themselves, has the following differentiating traits:
- All game genres: all kinds of videogames platforms as well as traditional tabletop games are supported.
- International funding: submissions from around the world are accepted, with automatic currency exchange and PayPal support.
- Marketplace: successfully funded games, once fully developed, will have the option to be sold directly from this site.
- Fixed funding: project submitters will get the raised funds only if the total goal is reached.
- Launchcrew: those projects chosen to be prominently featured will benefit from the advice of a team of gaming experts, writers and personalities to try to reach their goals.
- XP and Leaderboards: contributors will earn XP points for pledging to campaigns as well as spreading the word on social networks. These points will be redeemable for games and merchandise from the site's marketplace.
Among the aforementioned current projects, there's one interesting Linux game: Ostrich Island: Escape from Paradise, developed by MeDungeon Games. It's a unique mix of adventure, platformer and RPG, and suitable for all ages.
Their goal is set at a modest $3,000 which will be used to create additional game assets, to purchase a full Unity3D license (to improve game appearance) and to finish the multiplayer implementation. You can even download a demo from the game's site to give it a try before pledging.
Sources:
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
This seriously looks like a server-side related issue though. It looks like everytime I try to go to the website, it's directly trying to connect to the root directory. Is this even allowed? I'm not too familiar with how servers work, but this doesn't look right.
Anyway, it doesn't make much sense to me for a platform that prides itself to be International and to accept submissions from around the world to go around blocking whole countries... I think the best you could do would be to contact them and ask them: [email protected] / https://twitter.com/gamelaunched / https://www.facebook.com/gamelaunched
If the former, there's a 'Contact us' link at the bottom right, and if the latter, although there's no email address all the projects pages have a link to their respective developers' Twitter accounts and Facebook pages (and all bar one have a link to their website).
Just wanted to clear up the error page issue that you guys were talking about. We had to block a total of 5 countries with ip ranging - not because paypal wouldn't allow us to use their merchant platform, but because it is illegal to raise funds online through site's like ours in those countries. So, in order to get approval from paypal for our api, we had to block those countries.
And yes, to contact us please use the link at the bottom of the pages, and to contact project development teams, you can use the twitter, facebook or website links on the project's page.
Hope you enjoyed the site so far. We have big plans for it and are hoping to fill up the project page very soon with more games.
Thanks,
James