Up and Coming Indie: Vendetta Online

Plenty of Kickstarters have come around recently promising the moon and the stars in online space-sim form. But Vendetta Online's proposition is a little bit different from Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous, two extremely ambitious projects with nebulous release windows.

It's already a game. You can go to Vendetta Online's website right now, download the client, and start playing. All the ships, stations, mineable asteroids, PvP and PvE factions, and action combat are already there. The game's been continually updated for more than ten years by its small team of four developers, an indie analog (and predecessor) to EVE Online.

It's crazy to see an indie MMO that's been around this long remain relevant and fun, despite some dated ship and station models. So why does Guild Software need a Kickstarter when Vendetta's been around since Bush Jr.'s first term? To overhaul the game with new graphics and added player-driven functionality, and bring it to iOS--it's already on Android.

Early backers who pledge at least $15 will receive four months of paid access to the game (a month normally costs $10) as the team drops in the expanded content.

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.