Why successfully crowdfunded drag-themed fighting game Drag Her failed to launch

gamesindustry.biz:

Drag Her, a 2D hand-drawn fighting game featuring a roster of real-life drag artists, launched its Kickstarter campaign back in February 2022 with a modest and cheeky funding target of $69,000. Yet despite meeting its goal, on May 15 2024, developer Fighting Chance Games announced the game's development had been officially shut down citing "a simple lack of funding."

Sceptics may wonder how a game that had met its Kickstarter funding goal would then run out of money, but for indies launching a Kickstarter, it's not uncommon to have a goal lower than the real costs of development as well as personal savings, in the hopes of securing a publishing deal to fund the game's full development. Whether or not this was clearly communicated to backers at the time is something that studio director and producer Ian Ramsey holds up as a personal failure.

"For us, the Kickstarter was specifically an opportunity to be like, 'hey, there's a market for this'," he tells us.

There had been about a year of development prior to the Kickstarter during which the team built a demo with just one drag fighter, but the crowdfunding money was essentially for funding a vertical slice "polished to the nines" that could then be presented to investors to secure more funding.

"It did open doors in that regard," says Ramsey. "We swung some grants from that. I think the failure to not be like, hey, this is strictly for a vertical slice, and instead promising something more that didn't eventuate is a fair criticism, and I feel really bad."

Yet on the surface, things looked like it was going well. Last summer, Drag Her was exhibited at the prestigious fighting game tournament Evo, where there was not only a small side tournament but also a 'Queen of Evo' pageant.

"I was nervous about Evo because it's a very masculine, competitive space," Ramsey explains. "Will people see this fluffy, femme fighting game as something that is of merit? And the response was overwhelmingly positive, which totally took us by