An nameless reader shares a report: Within the late Nineteen Nineties, Yoshitaka Murayama made a reputation for himself amongst a subset of online game followers by creating and directing Suikoden, a sequence of Japanese roleplaying video games (RPGs) that grew to become beloved for his or her scope and depth. A catchy method to think about them is “Recreation of Thrones” meets Pokemon. However in 2002, because the third Suikoden recreation was ending improvement, Murayama stop his job on the recreation writer Konami Holdings and went off on his personal. Within the twenty years that adopted, he did not work on many video games of observe, leaving followers to surprise what had change into of him. Ultimately Konami deserted the Suikoden franchise, maybe believing that RPGs weren’t profitable sufficient. Within the early 2010s, gamers began asking Murayama: why not fund a brand new RPG on Kickstarter?
In the summertime of 2020, Murayama lastly answered followers’ needs. He raised 481.6 million yen (round $4.5 million on the time) from greater than 46,000 backers, with a Kickstarter for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a religious successor to the Suikoden sequence. It grew to become the No. 1 online game on Kickstarter that 12 months. Attending to that time was an extended journey, Murayama informed me in a current interview. He mentioned he solely began significantly contemplating a Kickstarter after assembly up with a few of his outdated collaborators, equivalent to artist Junko Kawano, at a live performance for Suikoden music. Murayama was additionally pushed by the success of Nintendo’s Octopath Traveler, which has bought greater than 2.5 million copies since its launch in 2018. The viewers for turn-based RPGs had been “shrinking,” Murayama mentioned, however Octopath Traveler proved that âoethere is a promising marketâ for video games like his.
