I remember when the announcement of Mighty No. 9 went public. My YouTube subscription inbox flooded with videos of my favorite YouTubers promoting the project. My curiosity soon got the better of me as I rushed to see what all the commotion was about. What I found was the beginning of what looked like a stellar video game on a crowdfunding site called Kickstarter. Kickstarter, at the time, was a new way for individual companies or people to raise money in order to complete a project. Every donation amount had some sort of reward attached to it from wallpapers to lunch with the developers. I quickly went to look at who was working on this game. To my excitement, it was former Capcom developer Keiji Inafune, the father of Mega Man.

By that point, the initial goal of $900,000 for the project was already met. “Cool,” I thought, skimming through the concept art “This project is already good to go.” A few days later, I went back to the Kickstarter campaign after more YouTube promotional videos were released. I kept thinking, “Why are they still promoting this? The project was already funded.” To my horror I saw the amount that this project had raised:

Over 3 million dollars.

Now you might be thinking, why is that a bad thing? Why is it bad that the company got more money than it initially asked for? Doesn’t that mean they will have a better game?

Clearly not because after three years and 4 million dollars (money accumulated through Paypal transactions), we have the piece of trash that is Mighty No. 9. The game looks almost nothing like the original concept art and thousands of backers have yet to receive their rewards.

Why is it bad that this team received well over their initial goal? Well, this is because when they started to get more and more money, they felt they needed to compensate for those funds. The team started creating new stretch goals. These stretch goals included having console releases, having new game modes, and having extra characters.

All of these stretch goals sound fine and dandy until you realize that the team never initially planned on having these goals in the first place. They didn’t know if their project would be funded at all. So in order for the developers to please the fans that kept throwing money at them, they needed to create incentives. They needed to give the backers rewards for giving as much money as they did. However, the developers were probably not prepared to port a game to other console platforms. They probably had no idea on what the costs and hassles there are when it comes to hiring voice actors.

Thus the final product ended up being a less than stellar game. The ports are buggy, the voice acting is horrid, and the game feels rushed even though they had three whole years. The team spent more time focused on the stretch goals rather than the game itself.

This is not to say that this is the fault of the backers. On the contrary, all of the blame rests on the shoulders of the Mighty No. 9 development team. They stretched themselves too thin and made promises that they could not keep.