A Look Back At RAW - Scam Or Mismanaged Project?
731Kickstarter is nothing if not a world of wildly varying outcomes. It exists to help fund projects that lack their own stream of capital, and much of the time it works out just fine. However, there are a lot of situations that don’t go as planned. One of the more prominent, recent examples of those outcomes- or lack of an outcome- is the game RAW.
At first, RAW seemed too good to be true. As many kickstarter projects do, this one raised expectations to very high levels in order to gain the attention that was needed to fund the game. RAW was billed as a fairly revolutionary idea. Combining the concepts seen in open-world action games like Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead with a persistently active online MMO RPG, where each player would have their own opportunities to alter the world for everyone else.
Power, money, and livelihoods would all be in the balance of other players' actions as well as your own, and interacting with the world also meant changing it in fundamental ways. Whether you want to become part of the town’s power structure through government affairs, try your hand at business, or just mess around and complete contracts at your own pace, RAW was promising a little something for just about everyone who found the idea interesting.
Players could make friends just as easily as they could make enemies, and each decision would add another wrinkle to the entire thing. The project was met with interest as well as skepticism for it’s huge promises, but Killerwhale games pressed on with the project and continued collecting funding from Kickstarter users for quite some time.