Red Awakening is a pretty cool neon-infused, bloody, stealth horror game. It’s because of that unique concept and visual design that I immediately recalled that the game was originally brought to Kickstarter back in April. It failed back then, and has since returned for another go at funding. There’s not a thing wrong with that. After all, many great campaigns were finally funded thanks to a second launch. The issue, as I see it, is a simple lack of transparency. At no point does this current campaign mention their previous attempt at crowdfunding or what they learned from that failure.
Developer Domino Effect Ltd also made a move to obscure this information further by creating a new Kickstarter profile to relaunch Red Awakening. I really wish to know why some companies make this move. After all, a quick Google search would reveal that there was another attempt to fund the game earlier this year. Not only that, but unless the move was purely due to losing account access or something, it paints the picture that people are afraid of sharing a past failure. Failure is important. We, as people, learn and grow from it. The current Red Awakening Kickstarter has some improved sceenshots and a tiny bit of pitch tightening, but not as much as may be expected.
Really though, let’s just ignore all that and assess things as if this were a 100% new title out on Kickstarter. The one issue which Domino Effect needs to address head on is their lack of social presence. So far there is only one backer update and it was hard to find a Twitter account. Good games will rarely be discovered on their own — you need to advocate for them to get the conversation started.
Track the progress of the Red Awakening Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
I’m with ya Marcus. I don’t think they’re doing anything shady, but it is irritating when developers don’t acknowledge previous campaigns. Forces me as a backer to go do additional investigating to be sure that things didn’t go to hell in the previous campaign.