After there was a public outcry when the Kickstarter campaign for Project Rap Rabbit had sought $4.95 million to see the game release on Nintendo Switch, developers NanaOn-Sha and iNiS scrapped their original stretch goals to reconsider their approach.
In response to “overwhelming requests,” the stretch goal has since been lowered to a far more modest $1.5 million. The initial campaign goal remains at $1.1 million to lock in a PlayStation 4 and PC release, with 2,134 backers having pledged $146,000 so far at the time of writing.
“Those costs were all based on several factors: development budgets, accounting for our studios’ expertise with the hardware and the tools involved, platform audience numbers (with which we run retail simulations to calculate projected sales come launch – at which point we need to be targeting a profit) and, finally, our intent to secure both pricing and release date parity across all console formats,” the developers explained in a Kickstarter update.
“With these elements considered, we began forming the skeleton of our Stretch Goals. It made sense for us to zero in on the platforms we knew we could develop for without any unknown quantities arising, and to then present a plan whereby those communities would get a bigger game with more modes if Stretch Goals were met. Once we had that bumper experience in place, we ultimately wanted to give ourselves the breathing room to bring it all, wholesale, to Nintendo Switch.
“This order was especially attractive because, with every additional mode triggered through Stretch Goals, budget and resources would need to be weighted towards the Nintendo Switch version to fully optimise the new features: the multiplayer mode especially would require a lot of retooling. By pulling development for Switch forward, we ran the risk of needing to push multiplayer further back on all formats to account for these bespoke resources, thus pushing Project Rap Rabbit’s fullest feature set further away.
“Seeing your overwhelming demand for Project Rap Rabbit on Nintendo Switch, we can hold our hands up and say that we got our ordering wrong. As a result, we have re-planned our resources to offer a Nintendo Switch version of our game as the first Project Rap Rabbit Stretch Goal.”
