In a launch day stream, Mighty No 9 creator Kenji Inafune addressed the player base and took responsibility for the issues and quality surrounding the game at launch.
The game has been ripped by many critics and gamers alike. Many have criticized the game’s presentation, calling it a cheap clone of the Mega Man series Inafune is known for. Inafune addressed the criticism during the stream, saying he understands their frustration and accepts all the blame.
“[A]nd if you want to hurl insults at me, it’s totally my fault,” he said. “I’m the key creator. I will own the responsibility.”
Inafune, accompanied by former Capcom employee and translator Ben Judd, addressed criticisms about the recently launched game. Among the topics discussed were the Kickstarter for the game, the game’s reaction among fans, and the difficulty with developing 10 versions of the game simultaneously.
Regarding the latter, Inafune and Judd spoke about how creating a version for 10 different consoles was a mistake. “In my many years at Capcom, and Capcom was known for their multi-platform strategy,” Inafune said. “But never did they ever do 10 SKUs all at the same time, 10 different versions all for one title.” Capcom, Judd mentioned, only directly worked with the base games, depending on porting houses to bring the games to other platforms.
With regards to the Kickstarter, which raised over $4 million for Mighty No 9, he explained that although it was a lot of money, it was not the total budget of the game.
“At the end of the day, at the end of a Kickstarter game, don’t look at the final number,” Judd said for Inafune. “Imagine that being 60 percent. But in order to increase the content in a wide variety of ways–stretch goals are largely going to be based around new platforms, etc.–you really need to be able to estimate the amount of financial burden that’s going to occur on the project. Even for someone like [Inafune], who’s worked on so many different games, it’s a really hard thing to estimate. It’s something to keep in mind with Kickstarters.”
