While Japanese creators have been doing Kickstarter-funded games for years now, they have always done this via some kind of external party that handled the business end of things, as well as the PR and handling of their crowdfunding campaign. To further confuse things, Kickstarter has never totally supported Japanese creators, until now.
The company has announced they’re officially supporting Japanese creators now, meaning indie game developers, designers, and so on within Japan can launch their own projects and link them to Japanese bank accounts and identification. The company also made Japanese versions of the Kickstarter website and mobile apps. >nichegamer.com/2017/09/14/kickstarter-finally-opens-to-japanese-creators/
OP's take on this: While I don't think the idea behind kickstarter is inherently bad, it certainly was used to produce a number of trash and scams. Good thing about it is that if someone has a GOOD idea they don't really need to cater to a publisher's whims and ideas of what would be more marketeable. Downsides are: It prompted an inflation of "pre-order prices", as you often have to pay full price for a product that won't come out for a good few monts or years, while logic dictates that you should pay less in the present for a future good. Also, for every potentially good project it enables, 100s bad ones also get lifted from the mud into the public eye, leading to a general sentiment of disbelief and disregard for projects using crowdfunding in general. Welp, this turned into a rant about kickstarter. Back on topic: Do you think nippon independant developers will fare better than westerners, as they usually do?
Jesus I should proofread more often. The my translator neural machine isn't as snappy as it could be Do you think japanese independent developers will produce better videogames than westerners?
Ryan Rivera
Considering the apparent superiority of their indies, I think it's a fair hypothesis.
Christopher Mitchell
Japanese devs produce just as much kusoge as the rest of the world. All I'm wondering is whether this will weaken the influence of the alt-left who's been trying to gatekeep japanese vidya lately and censor it all.
Lucas Roberts
Doesn't Japan have its own unrelated version of kickstarter?
Anyone know what it's called?
Kevin Gomez
It is a double-edged sword, but hopefully now Japs who have an ability to make games but no way to get funding will make neat games and eroge.
Adrian Carter
There's several, like makuake.
Dominic Reyes
Kikestarter is inherently a scam. You should feel bad for having such a ignorant opinion.
Tyler Bennett
Also, I think that would work better with animes than vidya, Animes has all that bullcrap of strategically pacing to generate DVD sells and all that archetype recurring shit because goddamn weaboos, considering this it could unlock creativity possibilities, but I mean, maybe anime is shit for deeper reasons than moneygrubbing.
As for games, I don't know much about the jap indie scene, but I don't believe they would get any better with funding, I mean, it's not like budget limited them at all. I'm visualizing pixel as I type this.
