First Wonder, that Giants: Citizen Kabuto spiritual successor I mentioned last year, has been cancelled. This isn't entirely surprising news, given that the Kickstarter failed, but at the time the team seemed hopeful that development might continue, with the aid of another funding source. That never happened, and so developers Rogue Rocket Games have emailed backers to inform them of the bad news. Here are a few quotes from that email, courtesy of Reddit:
"After the kickstarter failed we looked for other opportunities and partnerships to keep the development going. While your donations helped we were still self-funding 95% of the project directly out of pocket. The amount of investment needed to get the game to the next stage was too large for us to handle by ourselves.
"We had some interesting conversations but regardless of how excited some were for the project it came down to numbers and risk. For publishers, the kickstarter showed we just didn’t have or couldn’t find the audience."
Rogue Rocket is "going dormant" for the time being, the team focusing on "other projects and jobs" in the industry. That just leaves the matter of those donations, and the devs say it's "very important" that they sort all of those out, either by refunding the money entirely, or by supplementing it with Steam keys for the First Wonder demo and their previous release, Gunpowder. If you've sent them a donation, well you've probably received the above email, but contact them to say which option you'd prefer.
"I'm still very passionate about making games like these" the email concludes. "I always will be. They are unique and therefore rather hard to sell but once we get a foot hold I think they’ll be here to stay. I remain undeterred but it’s clearly been too many years since Giants and MDK and If I want to build games like First Wonder then I have to start off much smaller, simpler and grow a new audience. I have such a game in mind."
