There have been some glowing crowd-sourced funding successes among the recent onslaught of high-profile games pitches on the Kickstarter site, but it's a brave new world for consumers and prospective contributors have been warned to exercise caution and manage expectations before handing over cash.

While Double-fine and InXile have seemed like safe-bets to many, Elastic Games' Police Warfare pitch was seen as a markedly riskier proposition. At first glance, it seems like the collective of supposed ex-Activision/Epic/Ubisoft/EA devs pitching the game have realised this -- or that their funding goal was not likely to be sufficient -- as the Kickstarter Project for Police Warfare has now been cancelled without explanation.

According to Joystiq, the project had reached $25,025 of it's $325,000 goal, with 784 people having pledged (all whom will now not be charged a cent). The developer had only this to say:

Thank you so much for the incredible response to the game," reads an update on the Kickstarter. "We're shutting down the kickstarter account but this is by no means the end of Police Warfare. News will be coming.

In this instance, one of the high risk factors seen by many was the relative anonymity of the dev-team, or at least their inability to evidence their experience.

Additionally, the game itself -- a generic multiplayer shooter -- was not a niche concept, and really seemed like the kind of thing that could be successfully pitched to traditional publishers if the team was truly as talented as they would have us believe. So who knows? Perhaps that's exactly what they have gone and done.