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When Camelot Unchained ran out of crowdfunding money, Mark Jacobs did something unusual by today's standards: he put his hand in his own pocket and paid for development himself. Camelot Unchained didn't begin offering houses or castles or spaceships (let's call them horses) for real money, didn't become an intoxicating shopping mall for pledging support. Being delayed was developer City State Entertainment's fault so why should the community foot the bill?"It hurt," Mark Jacobs told me on the phone. He had already added $2 million of his own to the game's $2.2m Kickstarter tally to get the game made, but that was back in 2013, when Jacobs was talking optimistically about a 2015 Camelot Unchained release. He didn't realise programmers would be like gold dust and near impossible to find; he didn't realise the game's ability system would fail and need rebuilding; and he couldn't predict his wife would battle with breast cancer. $4.5m only took a team of 30 people so far. Something had to be done.
"It hurt my bank account a lot because I wasn't a billionaire or super-rich by any standard," he said. "But look, I made a deal, and I told backers I would do it. It's our fault. It was on us as a development team to deliver the game; we did not. The bottom line is we did not meet what our projections were. I made a choice and it wasn't an easy one: do I honour our commitment to those same people who gave us this chance by not treating them as walking wallets, or not?
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