Police Quest spiritual successor cancels second round of crowdfunding

Three weeks after Police Quest spiritual successor Precinct announced it would be cancelling its Kickstarter campaign early to seek alternative funding, the developer has announced that it will be ending the drive on its own website, as reported by Blue's News.

Raising just 3 percent ($11,890) of its $400,000 goal, a statement on the studio's website says, "Each member of our team has done their very best to make Precinct a reality. We put every effort into making a crowdfunding campaign work, but we have decided to end the Precinct campaign, effective today. Your generous support not only made Precinct a possibility, it also gave us the fire to try and make this work when the going got hard. Thank you."

Later in the statement to supporters, the company spelled out some of the financial challenges of popular crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and the use of Amazon's financial services.

"To solve many of the issues with our Kickstarter campaign, our new approach was a staged funding model, based on how traditional video game investment is done," the note says. "Rather than getting all of the money up front, our approach was to install safeguards to validate Precinct's quality and potential as the product development cycle progressed. This approach would allow us to create a playable prototype quickly, and also work closely with the backers at every stage of development. On Kickstarter, the overwhelming majority of backers simply pledged at the level to get a copy of the game. By moving the rewards into an online store for individual purchase, we were able to significantly lower our funding needs and allocate more money to actual game development. Using our own crowdfunding system, we could stretch backer dollars even further by not having to give 5 percent to Kickstarter and 5 percent to the Amazon payments platform."

While unsuccessful at funding the project twice, the team hasn't ruled out another attempt to bring the game to market. "Depending on the situation, we may decide to try again someday. The backing community are wonderfully supportive of Jim Walls making a new game. Likewise, our team remains passionate about Precinct, and are hopeful there is a way to make Precinct a reality in the future."

People who supported the second attempt to fund the project will not have their pledges debited.