Oculus VR has secured $16 million in its first round of funding as the company moves towards bringing its virtual reality hardware technology to the masses. According to reports from Panodaily and AllThingsD the series A funding round was led by Spark Capital and Matrix Partners.

Precursor Games has decided to cancel its Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for its spiritual successor to Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness - Shadow of the Eternals. With less than three weeks to go before the campaign ended Precursor was only able to raise a little over $300,000 of the $1.5 million it was asking for.

Precursor CEO Paul Caporicci explained the move recently in an update to the project's Kickstarter page.

Even as the makers of the Ouya console (seem to) struggle to fill the orders of those individuals who backed them in their successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign (to the tune of $8.3 million), the company behind the Android-based console announces that they have secured $15 million in venture capital financing and that it will move its retail release from early to late June. The $15 million in funding is from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the Mayfield Fund, Nvidia, Shasta Ventures and Occam Partners.

Phosphor Games has decided to put its ongoing bid to fund its super hero themed open world game Project Awakened on hold for the time being. The developer started the private funding initiative after it came close to funding the game via Kickstarter. Though that campaign failed, the developer noticed that thousands of gamers backed the project and decided to try again via its web site for the game.

The former staff members of Zynga Boston have managed to raise $2.25 million for a new game development start-up called Proletariat. The new studio managed to raise all of its funds through an equity funding run, according to an SEC filing by the new company.

Harmonix has secured funding for three of its upcoming products from Colorado-based capital venture firm The Foundry Group, according to Polygon. The firm generally invests in companies that are in the business of "human computer interaction," and its last high profile investment land at Zynga.

Project Awakened, a game that lets you play a highly customized super being of your own making is nearing the half-way mark of its funding goal on Kickstarter but only four more days remain for developer Phosphor Games Studio to raise the rest of the funds. As of this writing, Phosphor Games has raised $210,596 of its $500,000 goal from 5,324 backers.

Chris Roberts' Star Citizen has surpassed the $8 million dollar funding mark from several sources including over $2.1 million on Kickstarter alone. That milestone is leaps and bounds above the original pitch for $500,000. The PC based space sim from the man behind Wing Commander, Privateer and Freelancer continues to break new ground for a crowd funded game, raising more than a half million dollars in February alone.

Popular crowd funding platform Kickstarter has launched an app for iOS devices today that allows users to have more streamlined access to their favorite projects. The app promises the community the ability to "discover new projects, watch project videos, and get updates from projects and your friends." For project creators looking to get some funding from the community the app allows you to "stay connected with your backers, track your project’s progress, and post updates from wherever you are."

According to a Eurogamer report detailing how Triumph Studios came to be developing Age of Wonders 3, it was revealed that Mojang co-founder and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson was very instrumental in making it all happen.

The whole thing started when Triumph kept seeing a blurb mentioning Age of Wonders in the Minecraft title screen. After sending Persson a demo of the game they all managed to work something out:

With only four days left to earn the other half of its $1.1 million funding goal, Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor decided to end the WildMan Kickstarter Campaign.

Mobile game developer and publisher GREE announced details on a new $10 million fund to invest in and foster long-term relationships with "talented developers in the free-to-play mobile games industry." The fund is appropriately called the GREE Partners Fund, and will be administered by GREE International’s VP of Publishing and Partners, Jim Ying. The fund will allow GREE to invest an aggregate of $10 million through equity investments of $1 million or more.

With just two more hours to go in its Kickstarter campaign, Goldfire Studios has managed to go slightly over its funding goal of $20,000 for its gambling-based MMORPG, CasinoRPG. As of this writing the Kickstarter raised $20,161 from 197 backers. The next step for the persistent virtual world gambling game is a private beta test, though some of that testing will likely be tied to various reward tiers.

Dell has officially gone from being a publicly traded company to a privately owned firm with the help of a $2 billion loan from Microsoft. Given that Microsoft makes the top operating system for the platform, I suppose they have a vested interest in one of the PC market's biggest players staying healthy. Dell completed the terms of the deal that will take the company private, buying out stockholders at $13.65 a share in a $24.4 billion deal.

As mentioned by E. Zachary Knight on Episode 39 of the Super Podcast Action Committee, today is the last day to contribute to the Kickstarter for Oklahoma City, Oklahoma-based Goldfire Studios' Vegas-themed MMORPG CasinoRPG.

No one can deny that PlayJam's Kickstarter campaign for its GameStick Android console has proven successful, though not as successful as that other Android-based console Ouya. The Kickstarter campaign closed with $647,658 - $547,658 more than it was seeking with its original goal of $100,000 (the Ouya closed with nearly $8.6 million raised).

Indie game developer Andy Schatz thinks that stretch goals for all these Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns are "bullshit." Speaking recently to Penny Arcade Report, Schatz said that Kickstarter stretch goals are total bullshit and can lead to unnecessary new game features, the developer of the upcoming indie game Monaco said that the use of "stretch goals" - the promise of more game features if a certain amount of money is generated

At its current trajectory, Gas Powered Games' Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for its game Wildman will not be funded if it can't raise around $44,000 a day for the next 17 days. As of this writing the Kickstarter is at $352,827 of its $1.1 million goal. That leaves an outstanding funding deficit of $747,173...

Gas Powered Games is on its way to staying alive, as its Kickstarter campaign for its latest game Wildman heads towards the $280,000 mark. Late Friday Chris Taylor posted a video on the Kickstarter page explaining that he had to lay off most of the company's staff and that the only way to save the company and hire those people back could be the Kickstarter campaign for its single and multiplayer action RPG. Since that appeal GPG has raised right around $69,000.

After multiple reports from various sources revealed that a majority of the staff at Gas Powered Games had been laid off, Chris Taylor took to the Internet to comment. Apparently Taylor and a few employees are the only ones left at the studio behind such titles as the Dungeon Siege series, Demigod, and Supreme Commander. Recently Taylor and company launched a Kickstarter for a new game called Wildman but concerns over its early performance cause Gas Powered Games, who is short on cash, to lay off its staff.

Chris Taylor's and Gas Powered Games' Kickstarter for their MOBA-style action RPG strategy hybrid Wildman is well on its way to raising the $1.1 million it is seeking on the crowd sourcing site from the community. Yesterday after the announcement I posited on Facebook that they would need to raise at least $50,000 a day to be well over their goal in the time remaining (around $1.6 million).

Gas Powered Games founder Chris Taylor today launched the official Kickstarter campaign for his next big game called Wildman. Taylor and GPG are seeking $1.1 million in funding for the development of what he calls an action game that combines some of the best elements of his previous titles including Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander and Demigod. Taylor is best known for creating the ultra popular real-time strategy game Total Annihilation while at Cavedog Entertainment.

According to Kotaku, game designer American McGee and his company Spicy Horse Entertainment need more money to finish the development of their free-to-play action-role-playing game set in ancient Japan that combines role-playing and Japanese culture with a grim retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale.

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.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has received $500,000 in funding from Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus "Notch" Persson and serial entrepreneur (and Dallas Mavericks owner) Mark Cuban. Both donated $250,00 each to help the advocacy group fight for patent reform in Washington, according to GII. Cuban is also a star on the popular ABC television show "Shark Tank."

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.