Good news from the creative minds behind Data Dealer! We recently wrote about the Austrian startup’s international success as well as their Kickstarter campaign and – hurray – the Cuteacute US branch has reached their 50.000-dollar goal.
Still playing the game
Lately, a lot has been said about online data privacy and the alleged ease with which personal information is collected on the internet. Austrian startup Data Dealer has been working hard to raise awareness of this very issue by developing a non-profit educational game, where players need to collect and sell as much private information as possible. Its tagline humorously reads, “Legal? Illegal? Whatever.”
After their English-language release in May, the team launched a Kickstarter campaign to finance the full version of the game. Although they were off to a slow start, they managed to meet their target merely two hours before the end of the campaign. “It was a really close call,” co-creator Wolfie Christl told inventures.eu. “Throughout the campaign we were not sure if we would succeed.”
754 backers supported the team, raising a total of 50.362 dollars. Two backers pledged 2.400 dollars and will receive a customised demo version of Data Dealer. The folks from Cuteacute offered everything from magnets, stickers, T-shirts to adapted character and “evil corporation” profiles. Most backers pledged between 1 and 30 dollars.
Keep the data wheels turning
“It was a 24-hour job to further develop Data Dealer, and manage both our international demo release and the Kickstarter campaign,” said Christl. After recovering from the “exciting but exhausting” campaign for a few days, Christl and his team will work on finishing the full version. “It will take us between two and three months, and it should be online in October,” he said.
More than 50.000 people have played the demo version so far. The startup plans to incorporate an intro story, a multiplayer function and more into the full version.
Stay tuned!
