The best strategy now would be for them to be transparent and admit it one way or the other. This crowd funder has always been about getting rid of publisher limitations and publishers pressures and publisher smoke-screens...
...in doing so they have fragmented the funding base to lots of individual funders rather than two or three big ones. Their issue now is not singular publisher pressures but mass crowd pleasing, the overall impression of progress from people waiting for something they want and know they want verses demand for return on investment from a publisher who needs to make more money to make more projects...
...Saying "we are working on new real-time colour-bleeding techniques that will blow your socks off" is all well and good, but in an age where people are choosing to watch Youtube cat videos at 480p over a movie that cost a billion dollars to make on a 4k larger than life cinema screen, at some point you have to ask yourself "unless this is going to help fund the game by being able to sell licences to other game makers to use it, how does this help me get my Merchantman in the sky and overto Tyrol to sell some Rubbertree wood?" In short, it doesn't...
If they're fine, say "Hey we are fine, but are aiming to generate a steady $xxx to ensure when we finish the game we have as much funds as possible to continue to refine it and keep the servers free as originally promised."
And if they are not say "Hey, we are on course, we are on track, but getting us to this point has been a huge draw on the resources. We've not just had to make a game, we've had to make a new part of the industry from the ground up to give you this new game experience. We don't want to throw in the towel and push out whatever we are capable of right now, we want to give you what we know we are capable of giving you." at this point it will be the choice of the backers as to what happens. We will vote. We will be the publisher. How unexpected.
I want to go on record that i am not a doubter. I do not think they have issues as such...
...However I believe a rolling contingency plan has to be drawn up: Numbers off the top of my head here - CIG has to work out what % of the cash they have left and what % of it hey would need to push completion at any given moment. For instance, if they still have 75% of total pledge funds and it will take 13% of total pledge funds to push completion right now, they re okay, however if they have 75% of total Pledge and it would take 50% of total pledge to complete right now, they they seriously have to think about puling the trigger on bringing product to the table. The nearer it gets to the numbers matching each other the harder they have to think about saving some things for later when they have more than just one revenue stream and pushing the product out, because at the moment all they have is us. Once the game (a game) is out, they will have us and a game as revenue generator. And once the PU is out they will have a game, the PU and us. and maybe we will take a back-seat and become a minor revenue stream... maybe that is happening already?
Time to focus on taking all the eggs out of the basket...? Maybe...
I have asked a lot of questions and answered none of them. Just a little transparency...
