Remember Project Phoenix, one of the biggest indie crowdfund projects coming straight out of Japan? The team behind it released a recent update, and it’s not great news.
Creative Intelligence Arts revealed that behind their superstar team, which included Nobuo Uematsu, Creative Intelligence Arts founder Hiroaki Yura (Diablo III, The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya), Vaughan Smith (LA Noire), Kiyoshi Arai (Final Fantasy series), Steffen Unger (Halo, Crysis) and Larry Oji (Overclocked Remix), they had no programmer. The project still does not have one, one year running.
To be clear, CIA stated this was one of their major risks from the start, and it wasn’t that Japan was lacking for programming talent. Rather, they were waiting on one specific programmer, David Clark, apparently because the company was that impressed with his talent.
Unfortunately for CIA, David was not going to eventually come working for them, a la Square and Nasir Gebelli. David was working on Ori and The Blind Forest, and it seems CIA waited for him to finish that game too, but he eventually opted out.
Now CIA says they will finally be looking for a replacement, and promise to be more communicative in future updates.
To put this in perspective, work on Project Phoenix is now at a standstill, with no executable, textures, level design, voiceovers, localization, and scripting done.
When asked about refunds, Project Phoenix cited the Kickstarter clause that they are not obliged to offer them. They elaborated on this further:
The policy for not being able to refund on the grounds of delay, is the very fact that once we do dish out refunds, it will have to come out of my personal money. Contracts are drawn out, and some payments are already made via CIA. Therefore, I’ll have to take personally responsibility. However, I personally do not have enough money myself to refund everyone if everyone asks for a refund. This is why we have to take the position of not giving out refunds at all, otherwise it will not be fair for everyone.
Clearly, Project Phoenix has hit a huge snag, and perhaps one partly attributable to it coming from a completely new developer, lacking experience to anticipate and prepare for these contingencies. Under the label of Japan’s biggest indie crowdfund game, however, its potential failure will mean bad things to Japanese indies in the near future and possibly beyond.
