Dr. McNinja’s Radical Adventure was a game that was funded on Kickstarter back in 2012. The Dr. McNinja game raised over $15k but hit some difficulties. In September 2013, they announced that development would be on hiatus. There has been radio silence since then until Kotaku publicly shamed the team in their article ‘Nine More Successful Kickstarters That Didn’t Deliver‘.
Fat Cat Gameworks released an apology on their Kickstarter page in the form of the reply they were going to send Kotaku (The Kotaku article claimed that they hadn’t responded, but was later updated to include a small snippet). It is a sad story, but essentially the game does seem unlikely to come out since the developers are currently homeless. It seems rather shocking what happened to them, but it was a mix of too much ambition and forces beyond their control.
“Then, that winter, in addition to fighting with his chronic sinusitis and bipolar depression, Hunter came down with pneumonia, and was maybe a day from hospitalization by the time we convinced him to see a doctor about it. It was about two or three months until Hunter was well enough to return to work.”
While I don’t think Kotaku is wrong for pointing out failed Kickstarters, I do feel a slight level of disgust for how callously the whole thing was handled. Dr.McNinja was thrown in with legitimate scammers (Including the Confederate Express Kickstarter whose developers had their followup campaign, Knuckle Club, suspended by Kickstarter). The fact that many didn’t get a chance to comment and that even the developers of McNinja didn’t see the email until it was too late makes me think that this article was posted too quickly for most to respond.
“We were all fans of the comic and it’s amusing twists on common tropes. This was our first mistake.”
I urge you to go and read Fat Cat Gameworks heartbreaking apology and see that they are not here to scam you. I don’t think we should take these Kickstarters as a negative thing. Many people look at a Kickstarter that hasn’t delivered like the antichrist, but really it is an important lesson in having a financial plan in place beforehand. Just because a Kickstarter gets funding doesn’t mean it will succeed.
This is a tough situation. On one hand Kotaku did come on pretty strong, and didn’t appear to do a ton of research, but on the other hand you can’t ignore your backers for over two years and expect people to not be pissed off.
Reading the actual response the artist made was really heartbreaking… Sadly, that’s what happens when you bite more than you can chew. I do however believe that more consistent updates could’ve been a better way to approach the situation, or even revealing some of their struggles to their backers.
I’ve stated this before and I’ll state it again, if you launch a campaign and don’t commit to monthly or Quarterly updates, I won’t feel sorry for you when people misunderstand your actions. In the end nobody is happy now 🙁
i sincerely hope people remember that this is one of the potential issues that may arise with kickstarted games. I hope we continue to invest in games, knowing our money has a small chance of not producing results, because we want to fund games OUR way, and not via a traditional publisher. Publishers take these chances but never get called out. it’s silly that backers expect things to go swimmingly when they back a grassroots efforts, we should hope for the best, but deep down fund things because we want to help a fellow artist achieve a dream more than necessarily demanding a return on our investment. then we are no better than the publishers we love to see ourselves as the antithesis to. except Konami of course.
#FuckKonami
Amen to that though
[…] what’s going on. If a project suddenly stops updating I tend to assume the worst, and I think most people do as well. Sometimes, developers like to bring their updates to their own personal website and only […]
[…] update in September 2013 they completely disappeared. In December 2015, Kotaku included the game in a scathing list of Kickstarters that had not delivered. This provoked a response from the developers and they updated their […]
[…] can contrast this to the Dr. McNinja Kickstarter. This Kickstarter went silent for about 2 years after they hit trouble. Before that, they had been updating fairly regularly, but […]