After raising over 10 million dollars Artcraft Entertainment are taking their ambitious ‘throne war simulator’ MMO Crowfall back into crowdfunding. Using the IndieGoGo platform, Artcraft are now taking advantage of IndieGoGo’s new equity crowdfunding which similar to the new FIG platform allows, people to invest in the company itself.
The news raised some eyebrows as this could be a sign of problems for the development and usually means a red flag. Gordon Walton, ArtCraft co-founder says no to worry “We almost have the money right now to launch the game, but MMOs continue to add… We’re going to launch next year and from that point we’re not going to stop working on it; we’ve still got a lot more stuff we’d like to do. We’ve done a minimum launch feature set and we’re going to continue to march from there.”
Apparently, this is something that Artcraft have wanted to do for a long time but only now are they able too. Before May of this year only accredited investors were allowed to invest in companies, now however, anyone can which has opened the doors to new financial options for companies.
“If we had more money, if we had Star Citizen money, we’d make a bigger game! But we wouldn’t slow down the shipment.” J. Todd Coleman, Crowfall creative director, said: “To us, more money equates to more time and work on content in our game. We don’t have lavish offices, we have crappy old beat up furniture we bought at an auction; we don’t have big fancy latte machines or anything like that, although I could make an argument for the productivity boost we might get out of one of those! but I’m too cheap to buy one.”
“All of the funds that we get in go to one place with almost no exceptions: it’s into our people. It’s buying more heads - more butts in more chairs to produce more code and more art and design and more of everything.” he added. The developers went on to say that while they haven’t had many set backs during development, they are ensuring the quality is high which is why the game was pushed back until mid-late 2017.
People interested in picking up equity in the company can go to the IndieGoGo page where there is a minimum buy-in of $100 USD. We highly recommend reading everything carefully as investment is very different from normal crowdfunding.
