In just over three days since its crowdfunding campaign began on Fig, Wasteland 3 has officially reached its goal of $2.75 million.
“In a little over three days we’ve achieved our goal of $2.75M, allowing us to make Wasteland 3 the ambitious sequel you deserve,” Brian Fargo, InXile CEO writes in an update. “You are all amazing and we can’t thank you enough. Without you, we would simply not be able to maintain our independence and keep fully true to our visions for great RPGs that you love.”
First comes funding, then comes stretch goals. We’re seeing a new wave of veteran crowdfunding developers that have (hopefully) learned from past mistakes. This trickles down to much longer “Estimated Delivery” times, more expensive physical rewards, and much tamer stretch goals.
Wasteland 3 lists three stretch goals to push the total funding amount higher. Reaching $2.85M will add more custom parts to Ranger models. At $3M we’ll see a unique 80’s-style talking car companion, and at $3.1M a custom Ranger Squad Insignia.
The campaign is also utilizing “Ranger Team Missions.” These are a series of social media goals to motivate backers and investors to spread the word.
“These are community goals that will let you unlock bonuses for Wasteland 3 – new digital and physical rewards that go into existing reward bundles, new content included in the game, and more.” Examples include sharing fan art to following InXile’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. A similar tactic was successfully employed by Psychonauts 2, Fig’s first successful crowdfunding campaign.
Video game crowdfunding fatigue has been rumored about since its explosion in 2012. Wasteland 2 was one of the first multi-million dollar campaigns, along with Double Fine’s Broken Age. Thanks to these games Kickstarter catapulted into a viable video game publishing format. Cult sequels and big name designers continue to fare very well with crowdfunding, such as Divinity: Original Sin 2 ($2M), Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night ($5.5M), and Shenmue 3 ($6.3M).
