Last night I was forced to do something I never thought I’d have to do. with the failure of Settlers of Elyria, and five long months of only limited crowdfunding revenue coming in, Soulbound Studios has officially run out of money. And up until now, we were successful….īut to our great sadness…. So our goal for the last year or more has been to push forward as hard and fast as we could, relying solely on crowdfunding, until at least the Alpha 1 was complete. And if you’re not confident it’ll sustain you, then we’re not confident enough to invest.” For better or worse, we suspected that in order to get an investor, development was going to have to be far enough long that they simply couldn’t refuse because we were so close to being done. What we did find were several investors who said “Why are you talking with us? If you’re confident crowdfunding will sustain you, then you don’t need us.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find investors who understood that operating in a cash-lean environment doesn’t allow for growth, and stifles velocity.
It was all good development, necessary, and even appropriate for our team size, but slower than we’d have liked. The problem was, by two years into development, and two years being crowdfunded, our inability to get a large influx of several million in cash meant development was going slower than we’d have liked. Fortunately, we were able to continue crowdfunding for another couple years, at which point we felt like we were finally ready to start talking with investors. So the conversations generally went something like “Either work faster, show us more, or we’re going to want to take over development and make changes to the business model.” This was unacceptable to us, and one by one the conversations with publishers fell silent. But after being in production for just a few months, there wasn’t enough to show yet. We had publishers from all over the world flying in to meet the team, see our development progress, and get hands-on with the game. We were fortunate, or unfortunate as it turned out, to attract publishers very early on in our development process. So our plan was to use Kickstarter to, you know, kick-start the development process. When we launched our Kickstarter back in 2016, it was with the plan to use the money to hire additional staff, put together a playable demo, and quickly attract publishers who would be willing to fund the remainder of development. Our first game, Chronicles of Elyria, has been funded, thus far, almost entirely through the pledges and generosity of our backers. For the last four years, since May of 2016, Soulbound Studios has been a crowdfunded company.
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