Larian’s Swen Vincke on the Improvised Start of the Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter

You might have noticed that the timing for the launch of Divinity: Original Sin’s Kickstarter is a bit weird, given that right now two high-profile old-school RPG Kickstarter campaigns are running and that there’s been no PR lead-up to it. As it turns out, it wasn’t intentional, and Larian CEO Swen Vincke had to decide in the heat of the moment whether to wait or launch the Kickstarter after it was innocently outed by our friends at RPGWatch.

Here’s a snip:

You see, we didn’t plan on announcing our Kickstarter today. But somebody else decided for us, and that somebody was.

Myrthos !

Yes, the Myrthos from RPGWatch, my first stop in the morning to get my RPG news. He wrote a really positive hands-on article about Divinity: Original Sin (calling it Divine Divinity on steroids) for which we’re really grateful, but.

He published it today!

And. we only expected it to be published once the Kickstarter page was live, next week.

So.

Everything suddenly went into overdrive. Now for clarity, Myrthos is not to blame it’s bad communication on our side combined with the complexities of running a Kickstarter campaign from Belgium that caused this, but that’s a different story altogether. But still, it did leave us with a major problem.

Because if he published, then the others were going to publish also, maybe, we didn’t know. And there are about hands-on 70 articles lined up to give the KS some momentum, but obviously, we’re not going to manage to get all those articles online right away, not if we don’t give any heads up.and when all the journalists are busy covering GDC/PAX follow ups.especially after we asked them to wait for so long and promised to give them a date up front (which we couldn’t because we only this morning(sic) received approval for KS (which was actually fast given that we submitted it last thursday or so) etc.

So, what to do?

A) Go live tomorrow (so we could at least prepare a bit more and perhaps get the translations in)

b) Go live now and improvise

c) Go live when we expected to go live (next week), at the risk of not having the Kickstarter link in the articles, but with the advantage of being well prepared

I’m pretty sure several of my publishing friends (and fiends) are laughing out loud right now

In the end we figured b) was the best option, but really we have no clue.