Night Trap developers ask ‘How bad a job have we done?’
It looks as if Night Trap will join the growing list of former SEGA titles that failed to reach its Kickstarter goal. With five days to go until the Night Trap ReVamped Kickstarter campaign comes to a close, Night Trap LLC has only been able to raise a little more than $38,000 of its $330,000 goal.
Those behind the project have finally come to grips with the cold, hard reality of Kickstarter failure.
“We certainly got off to a rocky start, and didn’t do even a yeoman’s job of planning and describing our reward tiers and supported platforms,” a recent campaign update read. “It’s doubly frustrating because so many of you obviously want this to happen, and have been loud and clear in expressing your fondness for Night Trap, in particular, and both Digital Pictures and FMV in general.”
One of the biggest complaints from backers has been high number of pledge tiers that put off a lot of would-be contributors. For instance, there are seven $20 pledge tiers for each specific version of the game. Most campaigns have this lumped into one tier with the backer choosing which version they want after the campaign is over.
One interesting piece of information from the update is the news that the original Night Trap originally sold 850,000 copies from 1992 to 1995 across all platforms.
The update listed three primary reasons the team thinks its Kickstarter campaign failed: the rewards/platforms weren’t what people wanted, there aren’t enough Night Trap fans left in the world to fund the game and not enough people knew about the project to fund it.
“We did a really lousy job of getting the word out about the project. In our defense we can say that we had a number of publicity opportunities lined up both on TV and in print, but none of them came to fruition,” they wrote. “PR is a funny thing: you can do everything right and still not get lucky. And we really struck out in both print and TV media.”
I can say that SEGA Nerds reached out to the team very early on into the project to request an interview and for the team to appear on the SEGA Nerdcast, but we never got a reply back.
We don’t know if the Night Trap LLC team plans to relaunch the campaign at a later date, but we hope they take the harsh lessons they learned to heart and come back with a much more well-thought out campaign next time.
