Prismata Developer Recounts How Reddit Saved His Game, Redditors Respond by Funding His Kickstarter

Lightning appears to have struck twice for Lunarch Studios, the indie developer behind the strategy online card game, Prismata.

Elyot Grant, the founder of the company, posted a comment Thursday to a thread on the game’s subreddit community. In it he noted how the game’s success was largely due to Redditors picking up the title after it had suffered a catastrophic setback in September of this year.

“Everything Was Gone”

As a bit of background, Grant had recounted on a different subreddit about the setback, where his Prismata team had attended a major Toronto game expo to promote the title. After collecting information from interested attendees, Grant lost the list due to a computer malfunction, resulting in thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours spent with nothing to show for it. The story gained enough attention to attract the attention of r/BestOf and reach the number one spot of that subreddit.

Grant gained back the number of lost users many times over from that cross-posting to r/BestOf. Since then, the Prismata subreddit has gained a sizeable readership, the game enjoys regular streams on Twitch, and Grant says he has given out countless keys for the alpha.

“We’d Be Dead In The Water”

In his most recent post on Thursday, Grant thanked the Reddit community at large for its support and kindness, saying:

Truthfully, hitting the frontpage of reddit was, by far, the best thing that ever happened to us. The last two months have been the most exciting two months of my entire career as a game developer….Without reddit, I think Prismata’s audience would still consist of a group of 10 people playing once per week.

This same post seems to have attracted even more attention than the first, with r/BestOf cross-posting the post, yet again. A Kickstarter for the game that Grant mentioned also received a significant increase in funding in the wake of the popular comment. Grant later edited the post multiple times to express his excitement, saying that the project had raised “over 20k [Canadian dollars] today.” He ended his comments with this message:

Honestly, I am so f***ing grateful to every last one of you. You really have no idea what a difference you all have made.

Prismata‘s Kickstarter is still live for another three weeks, with a bit more than 50% of its goal raised at the time of this article. For more on the strategy card game, check out their subreddit community.