The Curious Case of Crowdfunding
I’m sure by this point, if you’re
involved in the gaming community, you’ve heard about Mighty No. 9. How could
you not have? It’s quickly become one of the most infamous games released this
year for several reasons. I personally haven’t played the game, partly because
I have better things to do with my time, but mostly because the game has a
known track record of destroying PCs and consoles, and I don’t want to
sacrifice a $250+ piece of hardware just so I can play a garbage game.
In case you missed it, I’ll give you a
brief recap. Mighty No. 9 was set to be a spiritual successor to the Mega Man
games, helmed by people who worked on the originals. After years of delays and
shady behaviour by both the people running the Kickstarter and developers, the
game finally released in June as an ugly, broken mess, leaving backers furious
that the 4 million(!!!) dollars they funded went to waste.
The biggest issue Mighty No. 9’s
brought to the table, however, is the age old question: is crowdfunding a good
idea when it comes to video games? Kickstarter and other similar platforms have been used in the past to create some excellent games, but we’ve also seen a lot of disasters.
Major gaming successes like Shovel
Knight and Undertale have come from the platform, but we’ve also seen disasters
like Yogventures, Star Citizen, and now Mighty No. 9 coming out and throwing
mud on Kickstarter’s good name. Since the release of Mighty, I’ve seen several
people debating whether it’s a good idea to pitch in to a crowdfunding campaign
at all, and I wanted to throw in my 2 cents.
From an outsider’s standpoint, it’s
incredibly hard to tell what’s going to be a success, and what’s going to bomb.
I remember back when Mighty No. 9 was first announced, people were so excited. This was going to be the
Mega Man spiritual successor they’d been waiting for that Capcom wasn’t going
to make, and it was being piloted by Keiji Inafune, the character designer for
the original Mega Man! What could go wrong, right?
As I write this, a second
retro-inspired spiritual successor game helmed by people who worked on the
originals is due for release next year, in the form of Yooka-Laylee. Since
Mighty bombed, I’ve heard countless amounts of people saying that Yooka-Laylee
is going to succeed where Mighty failed. My response to this is simple: how do
you know that?
I’m just as excited for Yooka-Laylee
as the next guy, but there’s still no telling whether it’s going to join the
ranks of Kickstarter legends, or be shunned like so many others. It helps that
a lot of original Rareware developers and people who worked on Banjo-Kazooie
are working on the project, but there’s still a chance it might turn out
exactly like Mighty No. 9.
Which brings me back to my original
point: it’s incredibly hard to tell what’s going to be a success and what’s
going to bomb. You’d think an RPG made mostly in GameMaker with MS Paint
sprites would be a complete failure, right? Well, now it’s one of the most
popular games of the last few years. And remember how quickly people wrote
Mighty No. 9 as an unqualified success, only to wind up with something that
even the people who didn’t completely hate it called it mediocre at best.
So in the end, Kickstarter is more
like a gamble than a stable investment. You never know whether your money will
wind up in a good product, or if it’ll just be left forgotten deep in the Steam
store. I doubt that yet another failure like Mighty No. 9 is going to kill the
platform, but it’s definitely brought back the question of whether or not it’s
really worth paying for something that might never come to fruition.
Song of the Week
This week I thought I’d go with a song
from a Kickstarter game: Strike the Earth from Shovel Knight. This is probably the
most famous song from an excellent soundtrack, so if you’re a fan of 8-bit
music and you haven’t heard it yet, I’d fully recommend checking it out.
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