As you all can imagine, I had a very stressful weekend. At 11am on Friday, I received a notice that my project was hidden due to an IP infringement. Apparently there was another Kickstarter named Steamcraft RPG and that guy emailed Kickstarter alerting them to my project. The project was shut down before I even had a chance to respond (something I think Kickstarter should consider changing). I had never heard of this RPG prior to coming up with the name myself and promoting at events like PAX so it was something completely unintentional and coincidental. I did get a message about it from a guy asking if it my project was related to this other KS project last week, I told him that they were not related and left it at that since my Kickstarter was already in its 3rd week. I don’t want to dwell on this too much, but I did want to catch everybody up on what happened. Needless to say it ruined my weekend and was very unfortunate.
There were a lot of positives that came out of it though. First and foremost, thank you to everyone that emailed me this weekend. I have tried to reply to everyone but if I missed you, please know that all your support and positivity has prevented me from clicking the cancel button on more than one occasion. Another amazing thing was that I got to meet two backers in person at the Unpub event this Saturday and hopefully they can start commenting and chiming in on how they liked the game. It went really well though and everyone who played was really digging the game.
The ultimate result of this debacle is that the name Steamcraft will no longer be used for my game. I thought about doing Steamcrafters (some people even suggested Steamkraft) or Steamtrade or something else somewhat related but the more I sat with it over the weekend the more I want to distance myself from the negativity that I associate with the whole thing. My current favorite is Brass Empire.
Chris
I just wanted to say I was at Unpub this past weekend, tried the game, and loved it! The theme of my corporation came through with the game I played, enabling me to keep flying Brass back and forth to my mining platform quickly (I was the one who played Windcraft Enterprises the last game before you left), while enabling me to quickly pump out these units as the Electric company and Corporation (Harlem Electric & Omni-Edo? I might have those wrong) kept on messing with my resources in their own unique way. I can’t wait to get this game, and neither can my wife (who tried it and liked it as well, she was the Electric Company, kept destroying my buildings & units).