Inafune on Mighty No. 9 – IP ownership, didn’t want to copy Mega Man, next game won’t be on Kickstarter, more
In an interview with Engadget, Keiji Inafune commented on a number of topics pertaining to Mighty No. 9. He commented on the benefits of owning the IP, how the team didn’t want to copy Mega Man, confirmed that a sequel wouldn’t be funded via Kickstarter, and more.
Read on below for Inafune’s comments. You can find Engadget’s original piece here.
On owning the IP…
“As a creator, as myself, the best thing that happened to this project [Mighty No. 9] is that I have the IP. The IP is mine. The IP is the company’s IP, so we can do whatever we want. And that will actually speed things up really nicely because once the backers ask for something, we don’t have to go over to the publisher or the first-party [studio] … or whoever we’re working with. We can just make the decision.”
On not wanting to copy Mega Man…
“We didn’t really think about [making] another copy of Mega Man. In a way, I wanna kind of evolve this genre and this action platformer kind of genre with this game. So, yes, we had Mega Man in mind at some point, but we didn’t just want to copy that.”
– Inafune is thinking about a possible next installment
– Doesn’t sound like the next game will be on Kickstarter
– He’ll instead team up with Deep Silver, the current game’s publisher
“I’m more thinking of making this game by myself and, since we have such a good relationship with Deep Silver right now, maybe working with them. Sort of starting a partnership with them and making this game from the start for them.”
– Inafune refers to the roughly 70,000 backers as “staff members”
– Only negative experience was the stress his team felt in emailing out three development updates per month
– The best aspect is that he was able to realize his concept
“I pretty much achieved every kind of stretch goal that was out there. At this point I can’t think of too many things I left off. In a sense, this game is kind of complete.”
On the Japanese market…
“We haven’t seen too many Japanese games or too many new Japanese IPs coming out in the recent years. For example, at this year’s E3, there’s not too many… almost nothing. So I think this is what the gamers want. And I think a lot of the Japanese creators, not necessarily the publishers, are realizing this and some of them realized they [can] just do the Kickstarter and they [can] become a really huge success. And of course this is a really good thing, but we shouldn’t just stop here with just creators. We should get those Japanese publishers to get involved as well. Wake them up and let them see how demanding the market is for Japanese games. So hopefully the publishers will see this soon enough and I guess [start] challenging themselves a little bit more.”
