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As a millennial (boo, hiss) born in the 90s, I was just old enough to enjoy The Guild, a YouTube series about a group of dysfunctional MMO players, when it debuted online in 2007. 12-year-old me, who’d just gotten big into World of Warcraft and online games in general was downright invested—but that was then, and this is now.
I am currently 31 (also boo, also hiss) and I’ve got a lot less hair, which is part of why I was honestly surprised when I awoke to the news this week that The Guild: Ren Faire’d has become the highest-funded Kickstarter movie of all time—and one of the most successfully-funded movies to be fuelled by crowdfunding.
If you head on over to Kickstarter and apply the correct filters on its search function, you’ll see it playing second fiddle to Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina’s animated “special”—which has since become a fully-fledged series spanning multiple seasons.
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Originally asking for $1.5 million, the movie has brought in over $6.8 million at the time of writing. Now, this doesn’t actually make it the highest-crowdfunded movie of all time by technicality—that award goes to 2025’s David, which raised around $52 million, though that was achieved through asking for investors, rather than backers.
It was also based on a little book called The Bible, not a web series from 2007-2013 about World of Warcraft players. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have a significant advantage when it comes to word of mouth.
“The Kickstarter is over. $6.8 million. You guys are incredible. Thank you for the support. The community. The creativity. We are so excited to make a movie and so much more for you guys,” writes Felicia Day, who created the series itself. Day has since had a prolific career as an actress and the founder of Geek and Sundry, who we have to thank for the existence of Critical Role.
Which is cause for celebration! Though, I can’t help but gnaw a little at my fingernails—The Guild was created originally in, quite literally, a different era, where MMOs were mysterious and inaccessible, and communities were more common. Heck, the OG series got picked up and streamed on Zune Marketplace and MSN Video. Remember those? I sure didn’t.
And hey, maybe the Knights of Good going to the ren faire’ll be a good laugh, but you’ll either have to trade out most of the humour for jabs about how everything’s on a Discord server now and high-end raids are datamined to death—or you’ll have to become a little dated, only appealing to… well, people like me.
Which’ll lead to three outcomes, two of which I dread: I’ll be reminded of the sorry state of my favourite game genre by a bunch of actors who’ve aged better than me, I’ll be mercilessly pandered to, or Felicia Day will successfully thread the needle and I’ll have nothing to worry about. And hey, 45,500 people with $6.8 million bucks to spare aren’t nearly as nervous. The Guild: Ren Faire’d plans to release sometime in 2027.
