This really is a magical, hippy-dippy time for gaming, isn't it? First, Tim Schafer rocks the world with a successfully crowdsourced project most major game publishers would be too afraid to touch, now executive producer Brian Fargo and members of the original Wasteland team have banded together on Kickstarter to produce a sequel, raising over $500K in just 24 hours . With less than a third of its $900K goal left to go, the Wasteland 2 project just got a big boost from an unexpected donor.
Huzzah! Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan has come to the plate and pledged $10K, the highest possible contribution to Wasteland 2 . Among the many cool things a top donation tier entitles Min to—including in-game statues, characters, and weapons built in the honor of high-level donors—he's also getting FIFTY free digital copies of the game, all of which he's generously promised to give away via his Facebook page .
Publicity stunt, you say? Well… so what? Actually, good ! Kudos to Razer and Min-Liang Tan for funneling money to where it can most benefit players and independent development! In a super weird and unorthodox way, you're witnessing hardware driving software development, which used to be a synergistic cornerstone of PC gaming. So, before you readers get all cynical in the comments below, please consider pestering other millionaires in the gaming biz into funding projects you personally believe in. After all, the absolute worst case scenario here is that Razer gets some kind of in-game plug. Seems like a small price to pay for something that wouldn't have come together otherwise.
