26 MMOs that wanted your money via Kickstarter – A sad balance after 14 years

Greed Monger

Setting: Fantasy / MMORPG  | Developer: Greed Monger | Platform: PC | Status: Cancelled | Campaign Year: 2012 | Funds raised on Kickstarter: $90,132 | Backers: 667

Ashes of Creation

MMORPG

Here is another Kickstarter MMORPG with a sandbox focus that aimed to walk in the footsteps of Ultima Online – featuring non-instanced housing, an immense focus on crafting, open PvP, and more.

Until the final cancellation of development in 2016, there were reports of fleeing developers who did not believe in the project, early developer cancellations, a comeback, and ultimately the end again. In a final post on Kickstarter, the head of the project, Jason M. Appleton, stated that it simply had been impossible to manage this project with less than $100,000.

There, the developer also explained that he planned to pay some form of compensation to as many backers as possible, in the form of a “WAVES Wallet”. Whether this plan succeeded is something we unfortunately could not find out.

City of Titans

Setting: Superheroes / MMORPG  | Developer: Missing Worlds Media | Platform: PC | Status: Still in development, Alpha | Campaign Year: 2013 | Funds raised on Kickstarter: $678,189 | Backers: 5,003

The developers of “The Phoenix Project – City of Titans” announced the project as a spiritual successor to City of Heroes by Cryptic Studios and were able to raise a good amount of money with the promise of a new superhero MMORPG.

The bad news: 12 years later there is still no finished game. The good news: The developers regularly provide updates on the development of the MMORPG, at least on cityoftitans.com. On the YouTube channel of the developer it has been quite quiet recently, the last video looks back at the progress in 2024:

According to the latest quarterly update, work continues on updates for the Unreal Engine used. Since version 5.6 caused many issues, there was consideration to revert to the old version 5.3. However, it has now landed on 5.7, which is supposed to have resolved some of the problems. Only when the engine foundation is stable can many of the planned features be addressed.

Meanwhile, parts of the team are working on improving movement through the world (now with swimming), on a functional UI, on the mission system, and on the effects of superpowers. All of this still sounds as if it is a long way from a release. Those who support the project, for $50 or more, have had access to the launcher for PC or Mac since 2019.