Thirty days after launching, one of the sloppiest professional campaigns in Kickstarter history has come to an end at $US519,999, well short of its $US800,000 goal.
Red Ash, which was pitched by former Capcom producer Keiji Inafune and his company Comcept as a spiritual successor to Mega Man Legends, seemed destined to fail from the start thanks to poor organisation and communication. Various stumbles along the way — like the announcement of a stretch goal for a port to a mystery console — turned a number of potential backers off and even convinced some fans to cancel their pledges.
The Red Ash team says the game will happen regardless, thanks to a deal Comcept struck with a Chinese gaming company called Fuze. Presumably we’ll hear more about their plans in the future, although Fuze’s website — which is full of stolen art and digs at other gaming publishers — isn’t very inspiring.
I would like to thank our backers for supporting us through this campaign! And of course FUZE for their cooperation!
— RED ASH (@RedAshGame) August 3, 2015
Meanwhile, the companion anime Kickstarter has succeeded, earning $US162,882 for Comcept. And rumours suggest that Comcept’s last Kickstarter game, Mighty No. 9, has been delayed to 2016. Fun times.
Comments
9 responses to “Red Ash Kickstarter Falls Short By $US280,000”
I don’t really have any business sense but if I were FUZE I’d be having a bit of a think about my decision to publish a game that failed to gain enough enthusiasm from the target market. That’s not to say the game won’t be a huge success, just that as it stands the pitch isn’t really inspiring that many people. Hopefully something good comes out of it though and Mighty No. 9 pulls together a bit better than it has been lately.
It’s an interesting concept:
a) Were the stretch goals not attractive enough to people to pledge?
b) What percentage of people pledge for a copy of a Kickstarter game, rather than stretch/pre-game goals? Further to this, did people not pledge because the game was guaranteed to be made, or because the market isn’t enthusiastic about the game?
c) How many of the people who would normally pledge for a game like this, didn’t because they felt burnt about the Mighty No. 9 game?
It’s main problems were launching on July 4th weekend, focusing on content rather than big expensive new features and bad communication. By the time most news sources returned from the long weekend people were already calling it a massive failure. Most of the stuff you see people complaining about (like the mystery console stretch goal) was a desperate reaction to the poor performance.
The FUZE agreement was a very late addition so it didn’t really impact the funding. I think they announced it about six days ago when backing had pretty much stopped.
I’ll gladly buy the game, but I refuse to back such a vague kickstarter.
I dunno, this was a really fumbled campaign so I think it’s hard to say whether or not the game would sell if published. Fuze probably see it as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something cheap. Although to be honest I’m not sure what they get out of the deal. They’re not publishing the game they’re just investing in it. From what I understand Comcept are still self-publishing the game and appear to retain everything. I would imagine they’ve done this in order to secure a big name title on their console when they release it but it still doesn’t seem like there’s a huge pay off in it.
Maybe they shouldn’t have started another Kickstarter while their current one is still not released.
Maybe they shouldn’t have mentioned they found a publisher and change the goal of the project before being fully funded.
Mainly not getting the first one out. A lot of people would be aware of it. And they would be thinking “why the hell are they focusing on this when they should be finishing up the other one”. And having found a publisher….very strange.
I don’t see anything coming out of this, especially after having a look at the FUZE website with the estimated release date of their own game console as “June 2015″… The Mighty No. 9 and Red Ash stories are pretty entertaining though, on the bright side, at least the anime counterpart was funded?
Red Ash sounds like a Pokemon fan game
people really need to wake the fuck up and stop funding shit.