Thursday, October 1, 2015

The Secret Developers Of The Industry - [Polygon]

"In July 2015, developer Comcept launched a Kickstarter campaign for its game Red Ash. It didn’t go well.

Despite raising over $500,000 in pledges, the campaign missed its target and critics pummeled its approach — pointing to Comcept launching the campaign before seeing through a previous one, announcing a console port without identifying which console and continuing the campaign after finding external funding.

For production studio Hyde, which had teamed with Comcept to develop the game, the campaign presented a new problem.

Hyde has been around since 2002, has worked on over 200 games and has had a hand in some of Japan’s biggest franchises, including Final Fantasy, Persona and Yakuza. It just can’t talk about most of them. The team often works in secret, doing its job but not appearing in the credits or mentioning the work publicly. Speaking with Polygon, Hyde President Kenichi Yanagihara estimates that he will never be able to talk about 70 percent of what the company does. And that worked fine until Hyde asked the public for money..."