Age of the Geek

By: 
Travis Fischer

 
When Hype Meets Hate
     
     It’s interesting how expectations and reputation can affect the perception of a product.
     This week saw the release of “Mighty No. 9,” a game that had many expectations to live up to.
     First, a bit of backstory.
     Even non-gamers are probably familiar with Mega Man in some capacity or another. He’s a blue-clad super fighting robot that jumps across platforms, absorbs the weapons from his enemies and explodes upon the slightest contact with a pointed edge. The Blue Bomber had a pretty consistent presence in the video game scene starting from his debut in 1987 right up to 2010 when Capcom, for reasons unknown, decided they’d had enough.
     Flash-forward to 2013, where producer Keiji Inafune had had enough with Capcom’s neglect for the Mega Man franchise. Inafune left Capcom to start his own company, Comcept, and launched the studio on the promise of doing what Capcom wouldn’t.
     Under any other circumstances, “Mighty No. 9” would be called a knock-off of “Mega Man,” but with Inafune and the other Capcom developers that followed him at the helm, it was instead dubbed a “spiritual successor.”
     Inafune went to Kickstarter and asked for $900,000 to produce the game. He got nearly $4,000,000, and everybody in the gaming world felt pretty good about that. Not only were gamers finally getting a new “Mega Man” game (in everything but name), but the success of the Kickstarter proved that developers could free themselves from their corporate shackles and strike out on their own.
     But things only went downhill from there.
     While Comcept proved to be very successful at creating a community around their project, maintaining it proved to be another matter entirely. A divisive community manager split the community against itself, creating controversy that shouldn’t have affected the game itself, but certainly dampened enthusiasm for the project.
     Then came the delays. “Mighty No. 9” was targeted for an April 2015 release. You may have noticed that it is not April 2015. In this, the game was a victim of its own success. By raising 400% of its original budget Comcept was able to fund a score of “stretch goals,” which included multi-platform releases and an online challenge mode, two things which drastically increased development time, resulting in the game being delayed three times.
     With morale plummeting as the user base grew increasingly impatient, Comcept released a tone-deaf advertisement that was outright insulting to the game’s primary consumer base. A base that had paid for the game in 2013 and at that point had received nothing but disappointment and frustration since.
     Then, last week, the moment of truth. The game was released… mostly. I’ve gotten my copy, but scores of people, particularly console owners and overseas backers, have yet to receive the game.
     So after all the problems and delays, how was the final product?
     Mediocre at best.
     Not bad. Not great. Just mostly okay. Nothing to write home about, much less write a whole column about.
     Mediocre games happen all the time. Every single week a developer you’ve never heard of puts out a game that you’ll never hear about. That game probably won’t be bad, but it also probably won’t be worth your time or money either. And nobody cares because nobody has any expectations for it one way or the other.
     Sometimes beloved developers even put out mediocre games. Platinum Games is a company known for their spectacular combat, so when they announced that they were developing a game for the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” franchise, it seemed like a match made in heaven. Unfortunately, the final product did not live up to expectations, which is disappointing, but it happens. Gamers shared a collective sigh of disappointment and moved on to the next thing.
     For “Mighty No. 9” though, gamers aren’t letting this one go. The community has been flush with memes about the game’s launch problems, underwhelming graphics and substandard gameplay. If the community didn’t get their entertainment value playing the game, they’re certainly getting it by tearing the game down.
     It turns out that if you’re going to frustrate and insult your customers, you better make sure the final product lives up to expectations.
     Some companies can get away with it. Nintendo, for instance, has struggled under an endless string of poor decisions since 1996. They are spectacularly out-of-touch with the modern gamer and continually make decisions that aggravate their most loyal customers. And yet all it took was one trailer for the new Zelda game to sell me on their next system.
     Comcept does not have that level of good will and at this point they’re unlikely to ever get it. With so many problems during the development, I’m not sure it’s possible to make a game good enough to earn back all that lost good will.
     For me, I spent $20 on a game that took nearly three years to make and one night to nearly finish. When I get some free time, I’ll beat the final boss and probably never it again. Were this a random game on Steam I wouldn’t have bought it, but that’s the chance you take when you Kickstart something.
     For Comcept and their investors, it’s a lesson learned the hard way.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and thinks now is the time for Capcom to announce “MegaMan X9.”

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