Skeleton Crew Studio and Jiro Ishii, director of 428: Shibuya Scramble, revealed that their upcoming game Shibuya Scramble Stories would receive a second crowdfunding campaign, scheduled to start on June 28. This was announced during the recent Shibuya Scramble Stories crowdfunding public meeting, which was broadcast live on YouTube. As reported by Denfaminicogamer, the crowdfunding page and other details regarding the platform remain under the wraps for the time being, with new announcements coming soon.
The second crowdfunding campaign was originally planned to be launched on April 28, following overwhelming demand for sold-out reward tiers during the previous crowdfunding campaign. According to Ishii, the original plan was to run the second campaign on Ubgoe, the platform which hosted the first crowdfunding project. However, due to major issues, the developers had to look for a new platform, which is why the follow-up campaign will be launching two months later than the initially planned date (Source: 4Gamer).
As for what the exact issues were, despite the initial campaign blowing past the target in only an hour and ultimately amassing over 55 million yen (about $340k USD), the developers only ended up receiving less than a half of the money. After missing the payment deadline, Ubgoe claimed that the money was “mistakenly wired to a different client,” and that it was thus impossible for it to immediately prepare the full amount.
To make things even more complicated, amidst the legal battle between Skeleton Crew Studio and Ubgoe, the platform’s servers unexpectedly went down on April 15, and are still unavailable at the time of writing.
Despite the situation still not being completely resolved, last month Ishii and his team confirmed that the development of Shibuya Scramble Stories would not be halted. The project has received support from Tokyu Land Corporation amidst the financial setback, and judging by the recent updates and BitSummit exhibition, it seems like the development is progressing smoothly.
According to Ishii, this time, the team has been very careful about picking their partner for the next crowdfunding campaign. Apparently, they have been having repeated discussions to make sure that the backer’s money would directly reach the project creators.
That being said, the second campaign will offer much of the highly popular rewards for the previous ones, such as giving backers the chance to play as one of the extras in the game, and allowing them to have their own writing be featured in the “tips section.”
Shibuya Scramble Stories is currently in development.
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