NEARstudios' pivot to Kickstarter is a story of devs seeking hope in a trying time
In today's edition, we have an interview with the developers at NEARstudios on their funding quest and pivot to Kickstarter, plus news featuring the likes of Sony and more.
A cozy RPG about woodland creatures surviving in the wilds is, in so many ways, a metaphor for this moment in game development.
NEARStudios co-founders Heather Cerlan and Jason Richardson are living a tale of the times. They're ex-triple A, bootstrapping their dream game, getting lots of verbal praise from potential funding partners but no hard cash. The team decided to turn to Kickstarter before their 2024 studio debut, but after the announcement went wide (and they scored a cool 200,000 wishlists on Steam in the process), they realized Kickstarter might not just be a last-ditch effort to find funding—it could be the best way possible to bring Hawthorn to life.
Sony's latest generative AI experiments have produced GPT-spliced version of Aloy that's super uncanny.
Back to the Con again.