Only five days remain on the Kickstarter, so be sure to head over and secure your own copy of this epic board game. Doing so is the only way to be sure you grab all the stretch goals, expansions, and everything that you might need.
I told myself that when this month finally arrived I'd do whatever I could to help support the effort. And yet, at the same time, try not to be super annoying about it. It is not easy to do both of those things. I am obviously super invested in the success of this project for a wide variety of reasons. That's obvious. Not only have I been working on it practically non-stop since last February, but the roots of this project literally go back over a decade or more. And that doesn't even mention the long history of projects like this within the Eve community, some of which are best left un-mentioned.
Someone asked me over on Discord yesterday if I was pleased with the response so far. It would be impossible not to be. This has been an extremely positive campaign so far, the response has been nothing short of overwhelming. And while there have been a few minor negative reactions here and there, it has been nothing important. In my wildest dreams I had hoped to break the million dollar milestone of course. But that was never a realistic goal. Or one that I'd seriously allow myself to entertain. And yet, that is what dreams are for. They don't have to be realistic.
It reminds me of something that happened on my very first commercial production early in my career. We were shooting a commercial for a client and I was just a junior art director on the project. It was my first time on a real set. The budget for the commercial was somewhere around 120,000US. And the Senior Copywriter did nothing but complain about how limiting the budget was over and over again. Finally the Senior Ad Executive on the project took him aside and gave him a serious talking to and I've never forgotten his words. This is real money. This is someone's home. This is the client's hard-earned cash. Don't ever lose perspective again. I took that to heart and even when I was working on $500 dollar or on a million dollar project, I always remembered that lesson. No matter what the final results are in this campaign - this is real hard-earned money from real people. You treat it with the respect it deserves.
I still firmly believe what I said years ago in response to another community project - this community can decide for itself if something is worthy or not. And I've been more than pleased to see this project be embraced in an extremely positive way. No matter what happens next we've made history. This is, by far, the most successful crowd-funded project in the history of Eve Online. We will have an epic board game based on Eve in players hands, something I don't think many of us ever believed might happen. And I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to be an important part of making that a reality. If this project had come along at a different time in my life, I might not have been able to participate.
So for all those reasons I am incredibly grateful to this amazing community of ours. Just as I have always been. You all rock.