The problem though is that $900k wouldn’t have been enough for the game to see completion, but asking for $1.5 million would lead to people thinking ‘he’s crazy’. Otherlands ended with $222,377.
If the OZombie Kickstarter had of succeeded around $1 million then McGee says he ‘couldn’t sleep at night’ knowing he can’t deliver the project and yet took the money.
”With OZombie we set that goal at $900,000 but I know that we actually needed $1.5 million to do that game,” he told Games.on.net. “I cancelled it when I did, not because I thought that we weren’t going to get to $900,000, but because I knew that we weren’t going to get to $1.5 million. So I would have cancelled that even if we were at $900,000.”
”Everybody would have scratched their head and said, ‘But you made your goal!’ Even if we were at one million I would have cancelled that campaign.” The likes of Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 greatly exceeded their Kickstarter goals, but there’s no guarantee to that kind of generosity and each studio didn’t ask for that kind of funding.
”If I’d come out and said, ‘I need $1.5 million’ from the beginning, we would have been told that we were being crazy — we were already told we were crazy! – and yet, with the success that inXile and Double Fine have had, where they’re asked for half a million and they get three, there is something at work there,” remarked McGee.
Couldn’t Spicy Horse have tried to deliver OZombie with the pledged $1 million? “No, that would not have kept me awake. What would have kept me awake at night would have been taking money towards a project that I knew we could not deliver on. That would have kept me awake at night.”
“Taking money to deliver a project we know we can deliver is great,” he says. “But, you know, one million is as useless as nothing if ultimately you cannot deliver on the promise that you’ve made to that audience. It’s much easier to sleep at night when you’re not digging that sort of hole for yourself.”
OZombie was also sacrificed because no group can put forward more than a single Kickstarter campaign at a time, and as OZombie was going to fall rather short of its true $1.5 million development cost, McGee decided to try his luck with the much cheaper short film project of Alice: Otherlands, which has been successful.
