Sinking Keiji Inafune’s Kaio: King of Pirates Cost Marvelous $3.8 Million Dollars

Ouch... I remember reading about this in Official Nintendo Magazine, and THAT was a while ago.

Gosh... !
I wonder if this game is Revived on Switch...

Inafune seems to have a particular talent for wasting other people's money. He should work for the government!

This looked so promising...

Had been looking forward to seeing how this game would turn out.. Too bad Inafune turned out to be an incompetent leader and borderline con-man. Unapologetic at the very least. I feel bad for the backers and the companies who put their faith (and money) in this project.

@Damo Um... your website already told us that they lost $3.8m on it back in March 2015 when it was offcially cancelled...

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/03/kaio_king_of_pirates_by_keiji_inafunes_comcept_is_officially_cancelled

With that amount of money spent could they not have come up with better character designs?I think they look cheap and nasty.

Such a shame.
That reveal trailer looked so nice.

Forgot this was a thing or was going to be one

Aw man. I had forgotten about this game. I was really looking forward to it when it was first announced. C'est la vie.

He needs to either get out of the games business, or join up with Molyneux and the guy from No Man's Sky to create a dev team of truly terrible proportions and make the worst game ever made.

@antonvaltaz He knows, he even included a hyperlink to that article. This site is (in)famous for copy pasting their old work and reworking it on slow news days.

I hadn't heard of this but am getting serious Romance of the Three Kingdom's vibes from Guan Yu, Liu Bei and Zhang Fei up there. Was that a deliberate and explicit part of the pitch or plot at all?

Edit: Just read the Unseen 64 article so it seems so!

@antonvaltaz Exposed

I think Inafune has big ideas but he's not really management material. He has great artistic concepts that can go multimedia but he can't seem to take the funding given to him and get the game released (or in Mighty No. 9's case, released at competitive quality). He would have been better off if he had partnered with Inti Creates or other studios more instead of run his own studio.

@antonvaltaz Nice catch.

lol not one good game mentioned in the story

@BlueKnight07 Inti helped a lot with the concept and grunt work for MN9. Seems like things were just rotten up to.

@RedMageLanakyn To be fair, Molyneux's team was pretty good-- he just spent 90% of his time talking up his own projects rather than directing it, forcing his team to play catch-up with his ideas.

@CrazedCavalier Yeah, their teams have all been good, I'm just saying round up them up have them actually make a game without a team it would be the league of doom and deception!

Has Keiji Inafune become the Japanese Peter Molyneux?
Film at eleven.

And this, boys and girls, is why we like real publishers and not crowdfunding. The publisher took the risk, and lost the $3.8M. The consumers took the risk on Mighty No. 9, and got....Might No. 9.

@BlueKnight07 The trouble is despite his ego, he's a character designer, not a game designer. He's great at creating characters and being an artist, but he doesn't actually know how to make a game start to finish, he just knows how to make cool characters and settings. Those things together do not make a good game without game design. But he likes to play at running the whole show (and claiming more credit than is his for Megaman.)

@AirElephant LOL. And yet he still can't hold a candle to Kojima.

@Damo Haha, you don't neeed to apologise!

Damn! I remember being so excited for this game when first reveal. Such a pity they never did. Anyway, Inafune looks more mediocre by the minute.

@Damo no need to apologise man, it was news to me and several others as the comments prove.

@NEStalgia Hit the nail on the head! Most people don't seem to realize Inafune is the creator of Mega Man's looks, not the gameplay. That's like asking a graphic artist to head and produce a major budget film, in the end it was never going to turn out well, he just didn't have the experience to pull off a good game, no matter how many millions he had or "yes" men in his corner. Here's hoping Iga has learned something from it, i really, really want Bloodstained to be epic.

The trailer felt like I was watching a pirates of the carribean x romance of the three kingdoms game

I'm so confused what the point of this article was if it was published 2 years ago already? There is zero new information here...

it must been a mess for sinking that amount of cash then pulling the plug

@RedMageLanakyn Unlike Inafune, Igarashi is actually experienced as a producer and director, so he knows how to take the project from start to finish, even if he's not the design expert himself. Bloodstained should be fine so long as he hired the right talent for the design. Sure his ego has him taking credit for ALL of Castlevania as though he was involved in the original platformers, but he at least produced and directed the ones during the time period it's become most famous for. Inafune on the other hand honestly believes he can personally design the game AND manage the production based on being an artist for a popular franchise. Making an artist a producer is NEVER going to turn out well

It's rather unfortunate. I actually really liked Inafune back when he was still with Capcom, and was especially a fan of his artwork which became an inspiration to my own work, and still am actually. I still kind of like him to a degree, but I definitely do agree that his management at Comcept has been one disaster after another.

I've heard of Kaio before, but had no idea its costs totaled that high. That's pretty disappointing. Guess it kind of shows that he kind of needed Capcom. But it's no secret that he hated his job there too.

@Reginald There's a lot of reasons to dislike Capcom, but I can't help but think when it comes to Inafune that he hated Capcom simply because they told him "no" frequently and didn't fund his visions. And now that nobody tells him "no", we see why Capcom probably often had to do so

@NEStalgia So far, Iga has done well with the post Kickstarter information and such. Every month we get an update on progress. I backed at the $100 tier because SOTN is in my top 5, and the rewards were fantastic! One more year....

@RedMageLanakyn I still dislike how the kickstarter was just a "proof of market" for a real publisher. And that he didn't state that until AFTER the kickstarter. BUT he seems to be managing the project well.

Personally I don't do kickstarters, ever, so I didn't get in on that one, but I'm still very much looking forward to the game, and I do hope a physical version for non-backers will become available!

@RedMageLanakyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiji_Inafune

Always nice to hear another couch expert's opinion on what a man with the aforelinked portfolio should do with his career that's lasted longer than some gamers here may have been alive.

@RedMageLanakyn To be fear though Peter Molyneux has made lots of impressive games when he was part of Bullfrog and lionhead studios. He is not in the same class as 4 mediocre games Sean Murray and Keiji * no original idea ever* Inafune. Molyneux is atleast a programmer, Inafune is a character designer. His job at Capcom was drawing Megaman bosses. He can't make games

@nhSnork Thanks! Glad you enjoyed my opinion. He did good work under Capcom, and has proven since leaving them he can't hold his own, that's all I got out of your Wikipedia link

Being a producer on a handful of games is like being a book editor, not really much to brag about there!

@RedMageLanakyn that there's a pretty long list of games he hasn't been holding his own for, too.

@NEStalgia very true.

@nhSnork Like I added to my comment, being a producer isn't much to brag about. To sum up his career, he didn't even "create" mega man, he helped refine the design. He drew some bosses, was a producer on some games, and that's it. If you want to try and make it look like he did enough to warrant opening his own studio and making games.....you just go ahead and keep running your head into that brick wall!

@NEStalgia It was my first and probably last Kickstarter I've ever backed for a game. Also did exploding kittens, and that one turned out good as well. Just too many bad games and horror stories have come out of it to make it seem like a good investment anymore.

@Damo I only have so much storage left in my brain man. Now this story is in there twice. Harm done.

The trailer looked great....that's too bad!

I will say that the main character looks like Pablo the Penguin from Backyardigans. My oldest son used to watch that when he was a toddler.

I remember being excited when this was first announced. It's a shame they couldn't complete it.

@SushiGummy I thought the same thing when I read this article.

I remember seeing this, looked like it might have been fun.

I was actually really psyched for this game as we're my kids. Sad.

Should've made a One Piece game instead, lol.

It's so sad to see so much potential for a game wasted... getting too caught up in the merchandise & multimedia side of things. Too much wasted money. I can't see this game being revived in the right hands (away from Inafune) at this point.

I like the style and way this game looks but who knows if King of Pirates would have turned out as a good game.

@Anti-Matter Probably not, but if so it would probably be another mess like Mighty No.9, seeing how they sunk $3.8 million into it.

They're just confusing me...So Shu is blue now?

How disappointing. It looked so promising, too.

@RedMageLanakyn my last reply was pointing out the games he has had a hand in SINCE leaving Capcom and opening his own studio (which, incidentally, doesn't seem to require nearly as much "warranting" as you imply, or we wouldn't have multiple indie studios around). And you seem to be underestimating the workload of producers and book editors alike. XD

@Damo Well, on today's article there is no mention of the game coming to the Wii U. Somehow, it figures...

Pisses me off to see Inafune the useless hack attempt to work on anything. Wasn't even megaman's true creator yet he gets all the glory an I absolutely hate his mindset which is to make something that will become a multimedia franchise so that it could have an anime and mostly, the "merchandise".

I think games really need to aim for continuation or into a franchise of games, but that greedy fool only ever thinks about is how to make it sell merchandise, he's not creating games for the lore or the gameplay, it's simply to spawn merchandise.

I was really looking forward to this game a few years ago. Inafune said he finished the game but it was Marvelous AQL that was sitting on the game this whole time, what a hack!

Inafune has produced some questionable content over the years.

"The hope was that the game would spawn a multimedia franchise that could cover anime, merchandise and comic books."

Inafune and friends had similar hopes for Mighty No.9, and look how well that turned out.

The man is just an enemy to peoples' money

I remember this from a while ago...

Seriously fudge Inafune, the man is con artist that I'm convinced was never the brain child behind any of the successes that his name happened to be tied to.

So Inafune squandered nearly $8 million of other peoples money in the span of 5 years, between Marvelous and people who donated for Mighty Number 9?

I hope no one gives him any more money, he clearly doesn't care, so it's just throwing it down the drain.

It seems this guy has trouble getting software out on time. Does anyone else see this?

I bet Marvelous could have paid that money to Capcom to localise E.X. Troopers to 3DS instead of wasting it with this guy http://capcom.wikia.com/wiki/E.X._Troopers

Every piece of news that appears paints Inafune in a worst light. I'm not surprised that Mighty N9 turned out how it is.

@NEStalgia HAH. Possibly. But it could also be because of the poor working conditions there, as well. I recall one employee being so overworked that he had to be hospitalized, and given no concern when he returned. Then again, that's common in Japanese game development as a whole.

@Reginald Yeah but by the end Inafune was upper management. Something tells me he wasn't dealing with those particular problems anymore...he was responsible for overseeing them

And not to give western devs a pass, EA has been noted for much the same or similar practice, with some projects involving not actually leaving the building and sleeping on the floor for weeks. Not sure if any of those practices still apply, but at the worst...it seems more industry than company specific. Not that that's a good thing.

@NEStalgia True enough. It's just much more common and widespread in Japan largely because of how different society is there.