Uber Entertainment launched their Kickstarter campaign on August 15, 2012 with a goal of reaching $900,000 by September 14, 2012. The Kickstarter’s initial pitch for Planetary Annihilation was to create a new game in the style of Total Annihilation featuring many of that game’s concepts but on a much larger scale.
Uber picked a few features to highlight specifically to raise interest in longtime RTS players such as:
- Having entire solar systems with multiple planets as battle fronts
- 1vs1 up to 20vs20 battles
- An order queuing system combined with a strategic overview menu to better keep track of your army
- Random map generator
- Resource management in the style of Total Annihilation
- Game engine that allows for wildly different environments to play in
- The ability to dedicate a machine to hosting for multiplayer
- Full modding support
All these features being combined in one game got the RTS fans very interested and together they raised the initial goal of $900,000 in two weeks finishing on August 29, 2012.
Stretch Goals:
Once the initial goal of $900,000 was met Planetary Annihilation then went on to meet all of its stretch goals (Stretch Goals are additions to a Kickstarter project that are tied to milestones based on the total amount of money a project has raised). The stretch goals and milestones are:
- $1.1m – Naval Units and Water Planets
- $1.3m – Gas Giants and Orbital Units
- $1.5m – Metal and Lava Planets
- $1.8m – Galactic War – A single-player or co-op based AI skirmish campaign in a persistent but initially randomly generated galaxy
- $2.0m – Full orchestrated musical score performed by Northwest Sinfonia (known for performing the soundtracks of Total Annihilation and Halo)
- $2.1m – Video documentary of the design and making of the game
Funded Status:
At the end of the Kickstarter drive Uber Entertainment had amassed an impressive $2,229,344 from 44,162 backers making for an average of $71,882 donated per day.
