After steaming forward at unbelievable rates and becoming fully funded in 24 hours, the upcoming Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire just crossed $2 million raised, meaning it's raised in 7 days more than half of what the original Pillars raised during its entire campaign.
Still, though, even with all the numbers at hand and armed with the hindsight of Pillars of Eternity's success, Obsidian is still managing their expectations with Stretch goals, right now only having plans for raising $2.4 million. A brief jaunt through the history of the original game's Kickstarter campaign reveals that this isn't unprecedented.
Obsidian didn't even add a $2.2 million stretch goal until a over week into the original campaign. So, while the new campaign, via Fig.co, is technically more ambitious, it's only slightly so. And while the day-one rate of $100,000 raised per hour slowed down drastically, Deadfire is still raising money at a faster rate than its predecessor. The original Pillars took two full weeks to raise $2.1 million, a figure that Pillars of Eternity 2 is bound to hit in just a another day or two if the current rate stays.
It also appears that people are much more generous with their pledges this time around. When Pillars of Eternity crossed $2.1 million, it did so with almost 50,000 backers, according to updates from the original Kickstarter page. At $2.01 million raised, Pillars of Eternity 2 has around 18,000 backers.
And yet, Obsidian is reining it all in and taking it in stride, just as they did before, rolling out new stretch goals maybe once per week, before adding Pillars of Eternity's final stretch goal on the last day of funding. Although the actual money raised fell a tad short of $4 million on Kickstarter, after factoring in PayPal donations, they did beat that number and added the stretch goal.
Something a lot of crowdfunded games aren't able to say: we reached all our stretch goals. Obsidian can say that about Pillars of Eternity, and something tells me they'd like to be able to say that about Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.
