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Hardcore gamer hatred toward motion control is partly to blame for the failure of Kickstarter project Kung Fu Superstar, the game’s creator has claimed.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Kostas Zarifis, who previously worked at Lionhead before founding his own studio Kinesthetic Games, said users of motion control had constantly been treated with disappointed, and cited Star Wars, Rise of Nightmares and Steel Battalion as examples.
He added that despite efforts by his studio to change the perception of the tech, consumers were becoming less and less interested in these kind of games.
“We all know what the majority of hardcore gamers think about motion control,” said Zarifis.
“We’re not talking indifference, we’re talking hatred. And for good reason. Since the advent of motion control they’ve been constantly treated with disappointments (Rise of Nightmares, Star Wars, Steel Battalion… the list goes on).
“Unfortunately this is the climate we’ve been trying to pitch Kung-Fu Superstar in. And it doesn’t matter that’s exactly the landscape we are trying to change. People just don’t care about that landscape any more.”
Zarifis added however that the developer was also partly to blame, stating that it did not show off the title’s general controller functionality enough in its original pitch, with potential contributors turned away from the off.
He suggested that the video for the game was too slow in getting to the controller aspects, suggesting this should have been done much sooner to keep people interested.
“We were also too slow to go into detail about how Kung-fu Superstar is not exclusively motion controlled. Far from it,” he said.
"Anyone who has seen our demos and sees how we blend controller and motion control gameplay tells us, ‘I can’t believe how innovative this is. Why has no-one done this yet?’ Unfortunately the people who do get that far into our pitch are very few. Most people’s attention falls way before that point.”
The Kung Fu Superstar Kickstarter has just five days left, and has so far raised £36,340 at the time of writing from 436 backers. The project requires £200,000 to meet its funding target.
