How are you supposed to back a game if you don’t even know it exists in the first place? I’ve covered tons of Kickstarter campaigns in the last couple of weeks, and I only managed to catch wind of Perpetual Night in the last week of its campaign. And it doesn’t seem like I’m the only one who didn’t know about this dark-comedy puzzle platformer. The campaign is just about over, and things have been uh, dismal, for UK developer Studio Genkan, to say the least. They’ve raised less than 10% of their £60,000 goal, with less than two days remaining. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math there.
Running a crowdfunding campaign is nothing like developing a video game. Sure, maybe the working hours are similar, but running a campaign requires a whole lot of promotion and marketing. That means not just having a fantastic game, but posting regular updates to your Kickstarter, where people will see your product and be able to communicate with you, as well as pitching your product non-stop through social media. I see two updates on Perpetual Night’s Kickstarter page. The campaign’s been up since March 29th, and the first update, announcing the playable demo, was posted on April 22nd. Even if the demo wasn’t ready for release until three weeks into the campaign, Studio Genkan should have at least been communicating regularly with their fan base since the campaign’s inception.
There are only four comments on the Kickstarter, two from backers and two from the devs, and of those four, one says, “Don’t know why…but didn’t see this project until like yesterday.” Same here!
