While there has been some speculation that the Android-based mini-console GameStick will have a hard time competing with the likes of Ouya, that hasn't hampered the enthusiasm of the community. The Kickstarter for the tiny little stick-based Android device designed to simply plug into the HDMI port of most modern high definition television sets has easily destroyed its funding goal of $100,000 in a little over a day and a half.

It looks like the Android-based Ouya will have some competition. A Kickstarter funding campaign for PlayJam's "GameStick" has launched asking the community to help it raise $100,000 to bring its mini gaming console devices into full production. The GameStick is being billed as a home console that plugs directly into the HDMI slot of most major modern high definition televisions.

The Kickstarter for Barkley 2, the follow-up to the 2008 hit indie RPG Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, closed its crowd funding campaign just over the amount it needed to get fully funded, reports Polygon.

Black Isle Studios, a label of publisher Interplay, is trying something a little different: it is asking the community to crowd-source a "proof of concept" prototype of its post apocalyptic strategy role-playing game, Project V13. Funding tiers include $10, $20 and a Top 20 contributor tier for anyone who pledges more.

With just nine days to go, the latest indie game music bundle, "THE NUBUWO WINTER BUNDLE" has managed to raise $2,900 of its $8,000 goal from 124 backers. The Kickstarter campaign urges supporters to "discover game-inspired music and fund Tokyo's FAMI-MODE 2012 DVD, featuring live chip music performances and interviews."

Another day, another failed Kickstarter campaign. This time it is "Dizzy Returns," the brainchild of former Blitz Games developers Philip and Andrew Oliver, who finally and quite publicly threw in the towel today. The brothers admitted that their Dizzy Returns Kickstarter would likely fall short of its £350,000 goal - a goal that many in the community questioned and the brothers tried to defend shortly after they pitched the game idea on Kickstarter.

Yesterday The Escapist shined a spotlight on the Kickstarter project Code Hero, which managed to garner a lot of support from backers. The game, which promised to teach users how to create a game was asking for $100,000.

While many in the community are celebrating the fact that Johann Sebastian's Sportsfriends managed to hit its Kickstarter funding goal in the eleventh hour, many might not know that one person was instrumental in that happening: Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson. Notch had originally pledged $5,000 to the project but later decided to increase the amount he was giving by $3,000 to a total of $8,000.

A new Kickstarter campaign aims to fund the development of a gay/lesbian dating simulation called Coming Out on Top. A demo version of the game is already available here if you want to get a feel for what this game is all about. The creators of the game were looking to raise $5,000 to fully develop the game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. As of this writing they have raised $7,845 and have added a stretch goal of $8,500.

Sometimes crowd funding amazes the community and the developers looking to make their dreams come true and sometimes they show that an idea has no validity. Once in awhile there are sad situations like the one recently experienced by the team behind the game Alpha Colony, whose crowd funding appeal ended with team falling just $28 short of its $50,000 funding goal.

Pixel Academy, a New York City-based company founded by former Lead Game Designer at Nickelodeon (Mike Fischtha) has been conducting workshops for children ages 8-12 all over the city at locations such as homes and public libraries. These workshops teach children video game design, 3D printing, Arduino fashion design, and other fun technology based courses.

Veteran game designer Don Daglow wanted to make a smartphone-based baseball game called Tony La Russa's Baseball With Fans so he launched a Kickstarter appeal to raise $249,000. Unfortunately after only a week of activity, the project only managed to bring in about $2,440 of that goal from 23 backers.

In a weird, odd twist a Kickstarter campaign has been started to fund a donation to another Kickstarter campaign. While that is pretty much the length and breadth of British author Drew Wagar's appeal to the Kickstarter community, there's a little more to it than that.

Crowd funding site Crowdtilt began offering tax-deductible donations for nonprofits today. Crowdtilt co-founder James Beshara says that Kickstarter prohibits charity and cause fundraising, Indiegogo nonprofit donations are not tax deductible, and even Movember takes a 17.7 percent fee. The goal is to offer fundraisers the ability to raise cash for charity without having the platform they are using take a large chunk of it...

A Kickstarter for a space in Los Angeles where independent developers can get together is being pitched today as the "LA Game Space." The idea of the project - should it get the $250,000 in funding organizers are asking for - is to transform an old warehouse in the Arts District of Los Angeles and turn it into a hot spot for game design and independent titles. They plan on hosting workshops, exhibitions, research labs, public events with guest speakers, and space where indie game makers can set up shop. Think of it as a sort of indie game commune, if you will.

Popular crowd funding site Kickstarter has no plans or interest in becoming a publicly traded company, according to CEO Perry Chen. The company, which recently expanded into the United Kingdom and has managed to drive nearly $350 million into 76,000 projects since April 2009, is backed financially by a number of investors including Union Square Ventures, Betaworks and a number of angel investors.

As promised, Mob Rules Games has released Haunts: The Manse Macabre as an open sourced project. In addition to releasing the source code for the game (so the community can work on it) they have also released a playable build of the game (Windows). The open source project can be found here.

Kickstarter has officially opened up its doors to those in the United Kingdom who want to get in on the business of crowd funding projects. The UK version of the services "kicks off" with 200 projects. Kickstarter hopes that it will be as successful in the UK as it has been in the United States where more than 75,000 projects have launched and $343 million has successfully been raised to date.

While we often point out the failures of crowd-funded games like Haunts: The Manse Macabre, it's always good to bring you a story where a game has been successfully funded via a Kickstarter campaign and ends up being available for purchase.

Last week, Haunts: The Manse Macabre game developer Rick Dakan found that he had run out of money after successfully funding his game via a Kickstarter campaign. Obviously backers of the game were not pleased with this news and media outlets were quick to point out what happens to backers when a project they fund doesn't get completed (the general consensus being that they get screwed).

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts must be a happy camper this week as his Kickstarter campaign for Star Citizen cruises past its target goal of $500,000 with 26 days left before it even hits its deadline. Currently the new space simulation game from Roberts has raised $544,293 from 11,974 backers.

In Episode 25 of the Super Podcast Action Committee hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about what happens when a fully funded Kickstarter project (in this case the game Haunts: The Manse Macabre) fails to become reality, the wisdom of knowing when to shut down a failing Kickstarter campaign (the focus of that topic being Loot Drop's attempts to fund the 'Old School RPG'), the latest on the "six strikes" copyright enforcement scheme adopted by U.S. ISPs, Andrew's latest video, and the horrors of using voice chat on Nintendo's Wii U.

Loot Drop - the studio created by John Romero, Brenda Braithwaite and Tom Hall - has given up on trying to fund its promising old-school role-playing game project through Kickstarter. After raising only a small part of its $1 million funding goal, the trio has decided that it would be in the best interest of all involved to discontinue the funding drive.

Electronic Arts announced this morning that the very first crowd-funded game has landed on Origin, the company's digital distribution platform. After successfully being funded via Kickstarter, the post-apocalyptic vehicle-based action game from 2 Dawn Games and Reverb Publishing is complete and ready for purchase.

Electronic Arts announced earlier this year that it would support games funded by the community through sites like Kickstarter and would let them be sold via Origin free of charge.

Obsidian Entertainment's Project Eternity Kickstarter has hit a major milestone in its last few hours - it has surpassed Double Fine's Adventure game Kickstarter to become the highest funded game project in history. The crowd funding campaign for Obsidian's old-school RPG now sits at just a little over $3.5 million with just nine more hours to go. They hit this number with the help of 68,207 backers. Originally Obsidian was looking for $1.1 million. Obviously all this extra money was driven by promises made for meeting certain stretch goal milestones.

Earlier this week Wing Commander and Privateer creator Chris Roberts announced his newest game, Star Citizen, and revealed the launch of a crowd funding campaign for it. Roberts made his big announcements on the new space simulation game during GDC Online in Austin, Texas. Today, Roberts issued a press release announcing that Star Citizen has already raised over $455,590 from its crowd-funding drive. While some of the pledges are not showing up on the custom crowd funding page due to technical difficulties, Roberts says that the strong support he wanted for the game is materializing.

With five days to go, Obsidian Entertainment's Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for its old-school RPG Project Eternity has managed to raise $2,805,528 of its original $1,100,000 goal from 58,780 backers. The company has managed to surpass multiple stretch goals, which in turn has allowed them to add a ton of features and extras to the game that fans will appreciate. In the latest update to the Kickstarter page, Obsidian laid out its plans for the last five days of the campaign.

With eight more days to go, Andrea Seabrook has managed to raise $36,669 of her $75,000 goal to help fund her innovative podcast, DecodeDC. Seabrook says that "Washington D.C. is broken." She should know - she spent many years as a national correspondent to Congress at National Public Radio. A few months ago she had had enough of lawmakers "lying to her face" and decided to leave NPR to do something different.

Some interesting comments from Free Radical founder and the founder of the recently launched UK studio Crash Lab categorizes the Kickstarter funding model as "asking people without knowledge of the risks" to fund projects.

We've seen some interesting Kickstarters looking for funding, but a new Kickstarter that features Tom Hall (Commander Keen, Doom, Rise of the Triad, and Anachronox) and Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry RPG series) promising an "old school" role-playing game is one that probably deserves your rapt attention. The legendary developers, who will work with John Romero's Loot Drop on this particular project, are seeking $1 million, with a stretch goal of $1.9 million.