"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..."
