Precursor Games has announced that they will be “temporarily” shutting down both the Kickstarter campaign and their own crowdfunding effort for Shadow of the Eternals on June 6th, and will re-launch a new Kickstarter for the game in the coming weeks.
The studio’s CEO, Paul Caporicci, made the announcement in a Campaign Update on their website today, adding that “not a single dime’ will be removed from supporters’ Kickstarter accounts and all donations made directly to them will be fully refunded via PayPal.
According to the post, the decision to end both crowdfunding campaigns was made after “a host of new exciting opportunities that will make the game better” were suddenly discovered. Precursor Games did not explain how any of these “opportunities” justified the decision to end the current Shadow of the Eternals Kickstarter campaign, or the need to re-launch it in a few weeks.
Shadow of the Eternals‘ crowdfunding efforts kicked off early last month, but the campaign quickly ran into trouble due to Denis Dyack’s role as creative lead. Dyack attempted to ease concerns about his past in a video post on May 20th, but was ultimately unsuccessful in creating any momentum for the project.
Currently, the Kickstarter campaign has stalled out at just 9% of its $1.35 million goal with 14 days left to go. Precursor Games’ self-run crowdfunding campaign did not fair much better, raising just $157K of its original stated goal of $1.5 million.
Precursor Games’ full letter explaining the temporary shut-down of both Shadow of the Eternals crowdfunding efforts is posted below. We will update this post with more information as it becomes available.
To our community,
Since we announced this Kickstarter campaign we have seen more support from our community than we had ever hoped for. Along with this support has come a host of a new exciting opportunities that will make the game better than we envisioned. As a result, we have chosen to temporarily take down the Shadow of the Eternals crowdfunding campaigns on both Kickstarter and our own website on Thursday, June 6.
This doesn’t mean we are going away — far from it. We’ll be re-launching the Kickstarter in just a few short weeks with a reveal of these exciting new developments.
As we’re closing the current Kickstarter campaign not a single dime from this campaign will be removed from supporters’ accounts and everyone from our website’s crowdfunding campaign will receive full refunds via PayPal. As we re-tool our campaign and continue development, the forums on our site will remain open and active and any interested fans can still join the ‘Order of the Unseen’ to see our progress and join in the fun of creating content for the game themselves.
We want to thank everyone who has participated, volunteered, and spoken up to support us. You are our community and we value you more than you know. Stay tuned and we’ll be back soon!
– Paul Caporicci + Precursor team