The crowd funding campaign for Chaos Reborn is well over the halfway mark, with 14 more days to go until it expires on Kickstarter. The game is being developed by Julian Gollop, the co-creator of the hit tactical strategy PC game, X-COM. As of this writing the game has generated $115,958 of its $180,000 goal from 2,870 backers with 14 more days to go.

Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been successfully used by many to fund projects they otherwise would not have been able to get off the ground themselves.

But what about individuals or organizations that don't need crowd-funded dollars for their projects?  What if they could easily afford to fund it themselves?  Should they be able to use crowd-funding sites too or should they pay for it their damned selves?  Should their be rules enforcing this?  Laws?

After announcing that Paradox Interactive would publish Obsidian Entertainment's Kickstarter-funded RPG Pillars of Eternity, both companies spoke frankly about the partnership. The short answer? Both sides say that they think it's a relationship that avoids "BS."

In 2012 Jay Pavlina raised $53,509 on Kickstarter for a game called Super Action Squad. Flash forward to 2014 and we learn that the game is now "on hold" as Pavlina admits that he bit off more than he could chew with this project, calling it "a bad idea in the first place." The news is a stark reminder that you are investing in something when you back a Kickstarter project, and sometimes you lose money on investments.

Gaming site Unwinnable has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a weekly digital magazine featuring excellent and insightful writing from its list of excellent contributors. You can get a sample here (PDF), but Unwinnable promises that future issues of the weekly digital magazine will feature the best games and culture criticism from the all-star voices that have made Unwinnable great over the last four years.

PayPal says that it will update its policies related to crowdfunding, according to this Ars Technica report. The policy change would involve identifying crowdfunding campaigns early on and expediting payment to those that have made their obligations to campaign donors transparent. This decision comes on the heels of PayPal freezing the funds of several high profile crowd-funded projects.

Organizers of GaymerX2 have released a new video featuring Ellen McLain (the voice of GLaDOS in Portal) and John Patrick Lowrie (the man who brings The Sniper to life in Team Fortress 2) urging the gaming community to attend the second annual LGBTQ friendly gaming convention taking place July 11 - 13 at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco - and to contribute to the ongoing Kickstarter to fund the event. You can check out the video to your left.

Double Fine says that it has enough money on hand to develop and release the second chapter in its Kickstarter-funded adventure game Broken Age. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Double Fine studio head Tim Schafer said that enough people had purchased Act 1 to fund Act Two.

Freddie Wong’s company RocketJump has successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with more than $900,907 raised during a month-long campaign to finish "Video game High School," a popular sci-fi series about competitive gamers who attend a high school all about video games. Wong was seeking $750,000, but the project proved to be so popular that it set a record for a crowd funded web series on Indiegogo.

Yesterday Mid Boss Games launched the crowd-funding campaign for GaymerX2, seeking $10,000 to put down a deposit on the venue for this year's LGBTQ-friendly gaming event. After 24 hours online the event has surpassed its funding goal, bringing in $11,169 (as of this writing). With the deposit secured Mid Boss Games has an entire month to raise extra funds for various stretch goals, which can be found here.

Organizers of last year's first gay gaming and geek culture convention have launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding for this year's event, GaymerX2. This year's event is scheduled to take place at the San Francisco InterContinental hotel from July 11 - 13 in San Francisco. According to organizers, they need to raise $10,000 to put a deposit down on the venue.

Over the weekend Kickstarter revealed that it had been hacked earlier in the week and that, while financial information was not stolen from the site, other user information may have been compromised. The country's largest and most prominent crowd-funding site told users that attackers made off with usernames, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.

Playdek's turn-based tactical strategy-RPG Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians has surpassed its funding goal of $600,000 with only a few hours left to go. In a message to backers on its Kickstarter page, the company thanked everyone for their support and promised more details on the game moving forward:

Playdek has released a brand new update on the Kickstarter page for its game Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians. The latest update, answers a lot of questions fans have about this game being made by several principles that worked on such hit Japanese tactical strategy titles as Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. More importantly, Playdek is almost near its funding goal of $600,000, but the campaign only has a little over two days to raise the $90,669 it needs to get fully funded.

Playdek has released a new update on the Kickstarter page for its game Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians.

Backers of Obsidian's RPG Pillars of Eternity (which was once called Project Eternity) will be sad to hear that the game has been pushed from a Spring 2014 to a date sometime after the first half of 2014. Speaking to Eurogamer, Pillars of Eternity project lead Josh Sawyer said that because the game raised four times its initial target funding goal, Obsidian needed extra development time to accommodate the features it wanted to implement.

A new "Letter from the Chairman" post on the Roberts Space Industries web site from company founder Chris Roberts reveals that Star Citizen has managed to surpass the $38 million crowd funding mark. By hitting this new milestone backers have helped unlock the fully aquatic planet, the Cano System. Roberts also noted that he is excited and impressed with the use of the recently launched Organizations feature:

A new Kickstarter campaign for Space Pioneer seeks funding to bring to life a game that promises to let players travel to the farthest reaches of the universe, explore new worlds, and colonize them. But the most interesting thing about this particular game is who is making it and why it will likely feature a high level of realism and real science.

A Bluetooth ZX Spectrum replica keyboard on Kickstarter may have been fully funded, but a report on Eurogamer suggests that a number of ZX Spectrum game developers are angry with Maker Elite Systems and have leveled accusations at the company that have disgusted backers.

MomoCon, an annual Atlanta-based event dedicated to anime, animation, and video games is planning something special for its 10th year in operation: letting the community attend a free and publicly-accessible career fair. The career fair will take place Thursday, May 22nd, at the Hilton Atlanta from 12PM until 5PM EST, ahead of the official MomoCon 2014 event Friday, May 23rd until Sunday, May 25th.

Developers Scary Mostro and Section Studios have released a tech demo for their game, To The Death, in the hopes that it will drum up interest within the community to fund development of the arcade style game which blends the best of the "beat’em and shoot’em up" genres. The demo is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. You can read more about it on the To The Death Kickstarter page.

Game developer Bugbear Interactive has announced that its Steam Early Access initiative for its new racing game, simply called "New Car Game," is a smashing success. The company said on the official website for the oddly named game that they managed to generate $1 million in sales in its first week of availability. A free tech demo of the game is available to those willing to sign up for the company's newsletter as well - if you want to try the game before you actually pay any money for it.

Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo has raised $40 million in a brand new round of funding, the company announced this week. The money, which it earned the old fashioned way (not through crowdfunding, but soliciting investments from high profile lenders), will be spent to expand its business globally, and allow it to better support mobile platforms. Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin also wants to use the money to raise the funding engine's profile worldwide. Indiegogo raised the $40 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Chris Roberts and his studio Cloud Imperium Games continue to generate ridiculous sums of money from ongoing crowd-funding efforts for his latest space simulation game Star Citizen. As of this writing, the game has managed to raise an impressive $37 million dollars through a combination of the original Kickstarter campaign for the game and subsequent efforts through the game's official web site.

Former Call of Duty and God of War developers are teaming up to launch a Kickstarter campaign for a fighting game called "To The Death." As the name implies, To The Death is a fighting game for PC and Mac that promises to combine the best elements from first-person shooters and beat 'em ups with blazingly fast gameplay running at 60 FPS.

Richard Garriott and his development studio Portalarium have managed to raise another $1 million for his new online role-playing game Shroud of the Avatar. The original Kickstarter campaign for the game in 2013 managed to rake in around $1.9 million by its close - but like Chris Roberts' Kickstarter for Star Citizen, Garriott and company have continued to collect funding via the game's website. Combing the original $1.9 million with donations through the web site, Shroud of the Avatar has managed to raise a respectable $3,038,484.

A crowd-funding campaign has launched today on Kickstarter to fund Area 5's latest project - a documentary series called Outland on the people and culture of videogames. The details on just what aspects of gaming culture the series will cover is fairly vague, but the group hints at covering some interesting topics like game preservation efforts and movements, and eSports. Area 51 is made up of former 1UP personalities Ryan O'Donnell, Matt Chandronait, Jason Bertrand, Cesar Quintero, and Rick Curnutte.

Another day, another ridiculous amount of money raised for Star Citizen, the epic space-based game from Privateer and Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts and his team at Cloud Imperium Games. Over the weekend the game hit the $35 million crowd-funding mark - raised from a combination of crowd-funding from the company's official site and a very successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year.

Game projects were the most popular category on Kickstarter in 2013, according to this GamesBeat report. Kickstarter members pledged $200.4 million in 2013 (so far- the year isn't over yet!), with about $19.85 million going towards projects that ultimately did not hit their funding goals. With that subtraction, an estimated $178 million was pledged and received by game companies and developers.

The Kickstarter campaign for the politically themed adventure game 1979 REVOLUTION ended yesterday, falling short of its goal. The game managed to generate $304,741 from over a thousand backers, put missed its goal of $395,000 when the campaign hit its deadline yesterday. In a note to backers, the development team from iNK Stories said that they were grateful to those people who supported them with a financial commitment and vowed to continue to find funding for the game.