Rhythm games are niche. The amount of rhythm games and their player bases compared to other video games is small and limited. One game that changed this was a game called Friday Night Funkin’.
The game blew up in early 2021 during the pandemic. Friday Night Funkin’ only being a demo, the four creators from the website Newgrounds wanted this Newgrounds love letter of a rhythm game to be more than that; they aptly started a Kickstarter to make this dream of a game they were making become a full reality.
Developers asked for $60,000 to be reached in a month. They instead reached $2,000,000. This gave them so much to work on, like expanding their entire team to get loads of people to help as well as working on all the extra stretch goals that were reached.
After the Kickstarter ended, things were taking too long to release and people weren’t getting enough updates on what was happening with their money. This led people to ask and even state, is Friday Night Funkin a scam?
Friday Night Funkin’s creator, NinjaMuffin99, or Cameron Taylor, was keen on making monthly updates on the Kickstarter. This ended in July 2022, causing backlash. People wanted to know where their money went. But as the backlash was going on, the lead artist PhantomArcade, was streaming art for new levels of the game.
“Games take time to make, just look at a game like Breath of the Wild,” said William Michael, video game design teacher at Nonnewaug High. “People just need to wait for the developers to catch their breath, a quality game doesn’t get finished as quickly as the people want it to.”
“At first it seemed like that thanks to the developers being really silent and almost irresponsible when it came to giving updates on the state of the game, the products that came as rewards with the Kickstarter and overall there was a severe lack of communication,” said Neik, Friday Night Funkin Connoisseur. “With the creation of a public blog, twitch livestreams and more the developers have already improved on their faults in terms of communication.”
As stated prior by Neik, the problem was eventually resolved as a weekly blog was created to ensure updates would get out in a timely manner and rest people’s minds on where their money actually went.
Also, rewards such as posters and vinyls have been being shipped recently so people’s money is already being given back to them in materialistic goods.
Horrible planning mixed with lack of communication led to loads of drama for these four small creators trying to create a passion project that became so much more than that.
Comparatively to lots of other real scams, people have enough information now to know that no, this is not a scam. The four creators have good intentions with the money and are going to keep their word about making the best game they possibly can.
