With over half a million dollars left to raise and only a few days remaining, Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor has canceled the Wildman Kickstarter campaign . Taylor didn't say what will happen to the hybrid RPG/RTS or Gas Powered Games, just that it makes sense to focus attention on "other ways" to keep the studio running.
"We are profoundly grateful to those of you who backed this project and Gas Powered Games," continued Taylor in Wildman's final Kickstarter update. "Your passion and hard work put us in a position to write this exciting new chapter in the history of GPG."
A "substantial" number of Gas Powered Games employees were laid off shortly after the Kickstarter campaign launched, which Taylor explained was to mitigate their losses if the Kickstarter failed.
"If I ran this team through the entire Kickstarter campaign and it fails to fund, then I have to let everyone go, shut the company down," he said in an update video . "No one gets any unpaid PTO, or severance, or anything, and that's that. And that, I decided, was not worth it."
Last month, Taylor told PC Gamer that "the water is rising" in the old publisher model, and that abandoning it for Kickstarter was a necessary risk. "It wasn't like we choose A or B," he said. "The old model just wasn't working. It damn near was dead, to put it in so many words."
We can't say whether or not Taylor will be moving to the mountains (or worse), as he threatened in our interview , but we certainly hope not: we'd still very much like to try out Wildman.
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