Mighty No9 New Funding

Mighty No. 9 caused a lot of buzz when announced in summer 2013, with its Kickstarter campaign proving to be one of the most successful to date. What began with a $900,000 goal rapidly stormed past that target to close on $3,845,170; with PayPal contributions added the total reached $4 million.

It was a triumph for Keiji Inafune and his Comcept team, with the various stretch goal reached also confirming platforms such as Wii U and 3DS, and even sneaking past a final Online Battle Race Mode target. Since then we've seen some footage of the game due in April 2015, and it appears to be taking shape.

Comcept is already looking further, having already lined up an animated series project with Digital Frontier, but has caused some surprise by announcing an additional crowdfunding campaign to be run through the game's official website. First off, below is a video introducing the campaign, from Inafune-san.

The structure of this new campaign is slightly peculiar. The animated series is entirely external from the game's funding, including this new campaign, and the 'Support' campaign is also operating separately from conventional pre-orders. Standard pre-orders are available in increments of $23, which is a copy on any platform, and the 'Funding' section is separate, with two tiers. For $50 you get a copy of the game and some digital rewards (Retro Manual, Art Book/Strategy Guide & Soundtrack), while $80 also gets you on the Steam Early Access program. A pre-order alone does not count towards the new funding campaign, while the exclusive Kickstarter rewards will remain unique to those original backers.

No, the exclusive backer rewards like forum access and special in-game content are just that—rewards for our awesome Beckers that supported us in spades during our Kickstarter campaign. Some of the non-exclusive content will be made available for purchase, and we are exploring several options for additional rewards. But one of the most important aspects of this new funding campaign is making sure our backers know that we hold their contribution sacred, and we don’t want this campaign to impact original backer rewards in any way.

...Right now we have three things available for purchase in the store: pre-orders of Mighty No. 9, beta access to the game (Steam, Windows only) and non-exclusive digital rewards, including the digital retro manual, digital art book/strategy guide and digital soundtrack. Pre-orders will function as just that: pre-order sales. All content besides game pre-orders will go towards the stretch goals in the new funding campaign. For example, the Digital Rewards Tier includes a pre-order of Mighty No. 9 and digital rewards. The sales from the digital rewards will go towards the stretch goals.

The company states that it has "a huge list of ideas we’d love to put in the game if funding allows", though the only stretch goal in the new campaign, so far, is Full English Voice at $100,000; at the time of writing the recently launched campaign has raised just over $2700.

The separation of pre-orders and the digital rewards is perhaps a little odd, and the decision to run a second campaign mid-way through development is rather unconventional. Let us know what you think of this in the comments below.

[source mightyno9.com]