UPDATE~TechRaptor has reached out to the team behind Exploding Kittens for their thoughts and comments. A new article with their responses and possibly other interesting things is on the way.
Just 9 days ago, Popular web-personality and comic The Oatmeal(Matthew Inman), along with game-designer Elan Lee, and former Xbox executive Shane Small, launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of Exploding Kittens. This "highly strategic kitty-powered" card game's funded-goal was only $10,000. That sum was achieved in under an hour and the project has since received over $4,600,000 in pledges from over 117,000 backers. These numbers are growing rapidly and are likely to inflate to even more epic proportions as the campaign continues for 20 more days.
Exploding Kittens - Blowing Up Near You
Still, an important distinction should be made. While this is the most backed Kickstarter campaign to date, it is not the most funded. That honor goes to the Coolest Cooler project, launched by Ryan Grepper, from Portland, Oregon. His project raised a whopping $13,285,226, with 62,642 backers.
The previously most backed campaign was LeVar Burton & Reading Rainbow's, Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere! project, with 105,857 backers and $5,408,916 in pledges.
The Exploding Kittens team has excitedly been sharing their success story on social media, and posted this statement to their kickstarter page.
"The Most Backed Campaign in Kickstarter HistoryHas nothing to do with:
It has everything to do with you. You wonderful people have come together to form the largest community in Kickstarter history, and the numbers keep rising.
- Money
- Press
- Campaign Updates
- Fancy Graphics
- Stretch Goals
- Ability to invent new words in titles
Tomorrow we'll talk about some important updates, but today is just about you.
This is your accomplishment, this is your title, this is your day.
Thank you backers, you are the mostestest.
The Exploding Kittens Team."
In the team's own words:
"Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game. The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck.While it is not entirely clear how all these excess funds will go into the card game, some additional features and bonuses for backers have been mentioned, such as, an additional NSFW game, and a version of the original with NSFW art.The game gets more and more intense with each card you draw because fewer cards left in the deck means a greater chance of drawing the kitten and exploding in a fiery ball of feline hyperbole."
This is obviously a huge success for the Exploding Kittens team, but some social media commenters have expressed that such a large sum is wasted on a card game. What do you readers think? Is this project being massively over-funded? Do you have any interest in Exploding Kittens? Where do you think backers should instead put their money, if anywhere?
