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.

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.

Chipmaker Adapteva wants to make parallel computing (or supercomputing) available to everyone, and they have launched a Kickstarter to promote a solution that costs right around $99. The Kickstarter project aims to raise at least $750,000, with a stretch goal of $3 million.

Australia's Minister for Innovation, Services and Small Business Louise Asher unveiled two new programs that he says will give Victorian games developers "valuable support to develop and market high-quality games for a global audience."

The new game programs will be overseen by Film Victoria, who will provide $500,000 to support the development of commercial projects through investment and business support. Mr. Asher said the Victorian Coalition Government is committed to driving and supporting Australia's growing games industry through these new initiatives.

Kickstarter has added new rules that the crowdfunding company hopes will strengthen the relationship between project creators and those that back them. In a post on Kickstarter's blog this morning, the Kickstarter team detailed changes that they hope will address the widespread concern that many Kickstarter backers think they are purchasing a finished product rather than funding its further development.

The official Kickstarter campaign for iMpulse launched this morning, with the aim of raising some much needed capital for this pocket-sized Bluetooth controller designed specifically for iOS and Android-based gaming.

British telecom company BT has apparently joined the ranks of OnLive investors that have been burned by Friday's announcement that the company would sell its assets off to a third-party entity controlled by Lauder Partners. BT said today that it is "highly likely" that it will be forced to write off its stake in a cloud-based video games service.

BT joins phone maker HTC, who said yesterday that it would lose its $40 million investment in the cloud-based gaming subscription service.

The Kickstarter for the OUYA has ended, with organizers of the crowd funding round raking in a final amount of $8,596,475 from 63,416 backers. Organizers were originally aiming for $900,000.

OUYA has managed to crack the $7 million dollar mark with a little over a day left to go before its crowd funding deadline on Kickstarter ends. As of this writing the $99 console has managed to raise $7,036,309 in funding (it started out with a $950,000 goal) from 52,932 backers. The Kickstarter campaign has 37 more hours to go.

You may recall our interview with Matt Conn (Episode 5 of the Super Podcast Action Committee) of GaymerCon, the first-ever gaming event that caters to the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community set to take place in San Francisco in 2013.

UK-based games industry-driven charity GamesAid has opened up the nomination process to allow for voting on which charities it will support in its next round of funding. To be eligible, charities must be registered in the UK and focus on helping children and young adults in some way. Of course these charities will need be be game-related in some way as well. Organizations also have to have a turnover of £5m (roughly $7.85 million) or less and running costs of no more than 30 percent. Nominations opened up today and will end on August 13.

Yesterday we reported that the makers of the Android-based OUYA console would be looking for funding outside of its Kickstarter campaign. Today her company is not seeking funding outside of the Kickstarter campaign and that it has no plans to find more investments at this time. In a statement Uhrman tried to clarify the record on funding, which is likely a touchy subject with fans who may have invested in the Kickstarter that has already generated over $5 million.

The Economic Development Corporation of Rhode Island finds itself highly dysfunctional in the wake of 38 Studios going bankrupt and not being able to meet its obligations related to $75 million loan. The pseudo government-corporate entity has been without an executive director since May when Keith Stokes decided to resign over the loan to 38 Studios. Today we have learned from several published reports that another loan the EDC approved is not going to be paid back and that another executive has resigned.

While the OUYA Android-based home console may be doing pretty well on Kickstarter (it's inching towards the $5 million mark), the creators of the console say that they plan to look for additional funding outside of Kickstarter. Some might balk at this new-found need to raise additional cash because the original crowd funding goal on Kickstarter was $950,000.

Since we're running a poll on it right now (if you haven't voted yet you can go here and do so now - even if you are not a registered member of GP), it seems only right that we offer a new update on the current level of funding for OUYA, the Android-based home console that has everyone either very excited or very concerned about the future of home consoles.

The Kickstarter for OUYA, the Android-based, indie developer-friendly home games console has been kicking ass and taking names since it launched a few days ago.

Stainless Games said during a Develop Conference keynote that the thrill is slowly leaving Kickstarter projects and that developers who are considering a pitch to fund their game had better do their best to craft the best possible pitch they can to be successful.

The company raised over $600,000 to fund Carmageddon: Reincarnation on Kickstarter, but Stainless Games co-founders Neil Barnden and Patrick Buckland consider the process not to be as easy as waiting for the checks to roll in - a lot of work goes into these pitches.

What a difference a few hours makes. The Kickstarter for OUYA, an Android-based home console system that promises a development kit for everyone and a strong open-source vibe, has already managed to raise an impressive $2,859,021 from 22,747 backers. This has to be a record, but the crowd funding campaign for the device still has 28 more days to go. The OUYA Kickstarter got off to a good start earlier in the week, generating close to $1 million in the first eight hours of its launch. The makers of OUYA were looking to hit a goal of $950,000.

InXile Entertainment announced that Wasteland 2 will include the original 1987 CRPG Wasteland for free. The original RPG is considered the godfather of post apocalyptic games and a sort-of spiritual successor to another game series made by Interplay: Fallout. This free offering would not have been possible without the kindness of EA towards InXile Entertainment because EA owns the rights to the title.

One of the biggest problems with Kickstarter is that it doesn't allow funding for companies outside of the United States but this fall the crowd-funding site will inch towards a more international approach. This fall companies in the United Kingdom will be able to fund their projects just like their comrades in the United States. This move expands on what is already possible in the UK related to Kickstarter because UK residents can already contribute to U.S.-based projects.

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched for OUYA, the new Android-based home game console backed by Jawbone Jambox and One Laptop Per Child designer Yves Behar, Ed Fries (inventor of the original Xbox), Amol Sarva of Peek, Amazon's Lab126 Muffi Ghadiali (who helped develop the Kindle), Peter Pham of Color, and Julie Uhrman of IGN as its founder and CEO.

In a deal financed by Arkenstone Investment, APB Reloaded creator Reloaded Games has merged with its parent company, K2 Network. The new company will operate under the Reloaded Games name.

"This merger represents the beginning of a new era for the company, as we evolve our two core businesses," said Reloaded Games CEO Bjorn Book-Larsson. "We have already signed contracts with independent developers to use our platform and portal for their free-to-play game distribution. We will announce those agreements in the next couple of weeks."

In days of old, Kickstarter would only sporadically release information on projects, and often only when one project or another met some amazing milestone. That practice is changing. Now the most popular crowdfunding site on the Internet will release daily statistics on projects so that visitors can drill down into the data. The information will be divided into three categories: Projects and Dollars, Successfully Funded Projects, and Unsuccessfully Funded Projects. These categories are in turn broken up into 12 sub-categories such as games, film, music, design, publishing, etc.

Feminist Frequency, a web series run by Anita Sarkeesian that explores “representations of race, gender, sexuality, class and ability in popular culture,” launched a Kickstarter campaign a few weeks back for a new series of videos entitled Tropes vs. Women in Video Games.  The project will examine and comment on female video game character stereotypes throughout gaming’s history.

Two Guys from Andromeda walk into a bar. The one guy says to the other, "Let's start a Kickstarter to fund a spiritual sequel to the classic Sierra adventure game series, Space Quest." The other guy says "F#@! yeah." Fast forward a number of weeks later and the Guys from Andromeda have managed to pull it off.

Roger Wilco may never fly again, but his spirit will rise from the grave in a new game tentatively titled SpaceVentures. The funding closed at $539,767 - $39,767 above their target goal - with the help of 10,809 backers.

This is one of those stories that will make people wonder whether the glass is half-empty or half-full when it comes to the statistics of success and failure related to games and Kickstarter. According to data gathered by Appsblogger and put into a handy-dandy infographic, almost half of the game projects looking for funding on Kickstarter managed to get funded, while more than half do not. Of the 1,729 game projects - which included card and board games too - around 43 percent were successfully funded.

The National Institute for Health is offering a grant to small indie game developers who are willing to partner with clinical neuroscientists to create game software that advances neuropsychotherapy and technologies that can be used to improve cognitive processes. While the grant only funds phase I and II research, but the goal is to quickly develop and commercialize successful studies.

Gambitious, a crowd-funding platform designed specifically for funding video game projects is asking established developers and those new to the game development to submit proposals for their game projects prior to the service's launch later this summer. The Holland-based crowd funding platform is an alternative to Kickstarter, providing a game development specific funding model that provides investors with an equity stake in the project instead of reward-based incentives.

Interplay co-founder and current InXile front man Brian Fargo tells Game Informer that Kickstarter can be the saving grace for mid-sized developers who can't find the funding and support they need from publishers who are more focused on AAA franchises and the high profile, well-funded studios that make them.