Barely a week after announcing a new Kickstarter for a roguelike RPG called Hero’s Song, former Sony Online Entertainment boss John Smedley has decided to pull the plug on the crowdfunding campaign in favor of taking on investors instead. The game had already raised $136,849 of its $800,000 goal from over 3,000 backers.

“After looking at our funding levels and the reality that we aren’t going to reach our funding goals, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to end the Kickstarter,” Smedley wrote in an update on Kickstarter. “We sincerely appreciate all of the support we got from the backers and the Kickstarter community.”

“This was our first Kickstarter and we made mistakes along the way. I want to acknowledge that right up front. We put a lot of time and effort into the Kickstarter, but it’s obvious missing things like physical goods hampered our efforts. It’s also fair to say because we’re early that we didn’t have enough gameplay to show the game off enough to get people over the hump.”

Despite being disappointed in the lack of early progress in the crowdfunding campaign, Smedley assured fans that the game would still be completed thanks to investors.

“Well the good news is that our Investors are backing us all the way and we’re going to get Hero’s Song done exactly when we said we would,” Smedley said. “I’m also happy to say that we’ve been able to do this without having to take money from publishers, something that was of key importance to us so that we could remain in creative control.”

Smedley promised that the team still planned on regularly livestreaming the development progress of the game on Twitch, and he said “we’ll be updating our website and all of you on a constant basis as we have cool stuff to show.”

Image courtesy of Pixelmage Games LLC