This is one of those things that's sort of hilariously depressing.
So there's
a kickstarter campaign up to bring back Mage Knight as the former players knew it, as a minis game.
The catch is, that like Heroclix Online, they want to bring it back as an online game. However, as part of the promotions for this, they will make and release a limited small set of real figures (supposedly with swappable dials to allow them to be played in Heroclix as well).
There are a few prrrrroblems though.
First, NECA (and their video game subsidiary) are doing great financially. The recent Mage Knight board game (which really doesn't have anything to do with Mage Knight other than a few names) was a big boardgame hit. Heroclix is also selling quite well. So it's one of those iffy "Big company with lots of money goes fishing on Kickstarter." situations.
Second, the rewards are really messed up. Most of the donation levels offer little to justify the price, and some of the few that do are unclear or costly (the big one is the $170 mark which is the level that gets you the promotional physical figures but even then it's not fully clear if the figures are random or not - for $170 I would sure hope not!).
Third, a lot of this feels like the real figures are just being dangled as bait by a bunch of programmers and video game designers hoping to make a new computer/console game, who just happen to be fans of Mage Knight. It's not quite a bait-and-switch, but it almost smells like one. Why not forget the video game and just have a modest Kickstarter to sell a small fixed boxed set of physical figures?
Finally and most importantly, they sure have set a laughably high goal. Sure there have been campaigns that got this high, but they started with modest ($20,000, $40,000) goals and kept upping the ante with more loot as they added stretch goals.
I don't think they're purposely looking to fail, but given how thoroughly the old WizKids destroyed the game's fanbase the demand really may not be there. They may have deliberately set the bar very high, such that they're only looking to do anything if the demand is so high that there's no risk to them at all.