Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro’s White Owls studio has only managed to raise 45 percent of its $1,500,000 funding goal for upcoming murder mystery, The Good Life. The campaign, which came to an end yesterday, launched in September.
Addressing the development on Twitter, Swery wrote a lengthy letter to fans in which he detailed what went wrong, and promised to run a better campaign on Kickstarter before the year’s over.
One of the first issues Swery raised was that of leaks, which he believes resulted in a lot of confusion:
The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that the game’s title and concept design art were leaked two weeks prior to the campaign announcement. Due to the leak, a lot of people ended up thinking that The Good Life was going to be a compact game with 2D graphics.
After spending a lot of time trying to hide the info that was leaked, 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 game The Good Life Really is.
A lot of people probably lost interest in the game at this stage, and I deeply regret that.
The letter also acknowledges that lack of PR and a confusing concept trailer added to the studio’s woes.
That said, Swery says a lot of lessons have been learned and he has no plans to give up on The Good Life.
We’ll update our readers when the Kickstarter campaign goes live.
[Source: Hidetaka Suehiro (Twitter)]
