In this candid conversation with [a]list daily, Paul Trowe talks about the ups and downs of his Kickstarter for Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded. He says it may be the last crowd funded game for his company Replay Games.
Replay is going to be remembered as one of the first game developers to turn to crowd funding. Just as the buzz was building around Kickstarter as a means of funding serious games, coming after high profile multi-million dollar raises by Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo last spring, Replay jumped in with a modest ask of $500,000 to remake Leisure Suit Larry. Trowe says that wanting to bring back the franchise, an IP he claims to have “loved” since his days as an underage tester for Sierra, didn’t give him many options besides turning to crowd funding.
“In our case we had to because none of the investment groups, whether it be VC, angel or individual investors, wanted to invest in a game which they thought was about sex,” says Trowe.
So Trowe talked with Fargo, and Fargo told him Kickstarter is more than a fundraiser, it’s a way to discover if there’s even demand for your game.
Replay succeeded, raising more than $655,000 during the Kickstarter drive and nearly $90,000 in additional money since. The experience was a bumby one. Fans lobbied for an entirely new Leisure Suit Larry game, not the remake of the original Replay intended. The game then hit a snag when Replay was forced to hand development to N-Fusion Interactive and replace AdventureMob, which made the demo that helped build fan interest on Kickstarter but ultimately misled Replay about development capabilities. Even as they prepare to release the game next month, Trowe says the experience has left him and his team so exhausted they may never turn back to crowd funding.
We caught up with Trowe for this interview at Game Developers Conference.
