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The developer behind a Kickstarter game designed for Kinect has blamed the gamers’ ‘hatred’ of motion controls for the project’s imminent failure.
Kung Fu Superstar was pitched as a narrative led fighting game which as well as accurately utilising Kinect’s technology could also help players learn authentic kung fu techniques.
At the time of writing the project stands at 36,320 – well short of its 200,000 target – with just five days remaining.
We all know what the majority of hardcore gamers think about motion control,” creator Kostas Zarifis told Eurogamer. We’re not talking indifference, we’re talking hatred. And for good reason.
Since the advent of motion control they’ve been constantly treated with disappointments (Rise of Nightmares, Star Wars, Steel Battalion… the list goes on). Unfortunately this is the climate we’ve been trying to pitch Kung-Fu Superstar in. And it doesn’t matter that’s exactly the landscape we are trying to change. People just don’t care about that landscape any more.
We were also too slow to go into detail about how Kung-fu Superstar is not exclusively motion controlled. Far from it. Anyone who has seen our demos and sees how we blend controller and motion control gameplay tells us, ‘I can’t believe how innovative this is. Why has no-one done this yet?’
Unfortunately the people who do get that far into our pitch are very few. Most people’s attention falls way before that point.”
As well as being glum about motion control, Zarifis is also despondent about the overall impact – or lack of – that the UK arrival of Kickstarter has caused.
Kickstarter UK hasn’t been the extravaganza we were thinking it might be,” he added. We were biding our time until the platform launched here firstly for practical reasons but also because we hoped the launch would be this big thing that would lift some of the ‘Kickstarter fatigue’ we have been experiencing.
What actually happened was we had a whole load of Americans telling us they were trying to pledge but couldn’t, people getting confused by conversion rates, people just couldn’t be bothered re-entering their credit card details (something we hadn’t realised you have to do on Kickstarter UK) and so on.
If I could turn back time I’d definitely launch in the US despite the hassle that is.”
