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Swery Reflects On Failed Crowdfunding Campaign For The Good Life
A month ago, Hidetaka Suehiro (more commonly known by his pen name, Swery65) launched his crowdfunding campaign for his newest game, the mystery RPG The Good Life. Today, the campaign is on track for failure, garnering a respectable but incomplete amount of $556,000, a little under a million short of its $1.5 million goal. Swery took to Twitter this morning to talk about where he felt the campaign went wrong.
The veteran game designer cited a number of reasons for the campaign's lack of momentum, suggesting that it was handicapped at the outset by the project leaking and letting players' minds run wild with possible theories of what it would play and look like before the team was able to actually debut it.
"After spending a lot of time trying to hide the info that was leaked," Swery wrote, "we failed to provide you all with accurate data about the game in the early stages of the campaign, and so people became very unclear as to just what kind of a game The Good Life really is."
He hits on several notes during his explanation, primarily regretting that they did not emphasize the right details, and what they did show simply confused people about what the game would be. As the man behind games like Deadly Premonition and D4, Swery is likely used to keeping concepts close to his chest, but that strategy does not work when crowdfunding.
Swery's full remarks can be found in the tweet below, which he closes by announcing the next steps for The Good Life. He plans to relaunch the game later in Kickstarter with a more clear vision and sales pitch.
[Source: Swery65 Official Twitter]
Our Take
The campaign had a lot of speedbumps, but I think it will do better on Kickstarter. The $1.5 million goal without a publisher is far from unreasonable, but Fig is an investment platform, and investing in a Swery game hoping to make a return on the sales probably was not especially attractive.
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