Motoaki Furukawa, the former Konami composer behind the likes of Policenauts, Snatcher and the Nintendo 64 version of Castlevania, and Pixel Co., a small Nintendo Switch-focused Japanese dev team, have lost their respective legal battles against each other regarding the abandoned crowdsourced shoot ‘em up Steam Pilots.
Steam Pilots was crowdfunded via Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake through two separate campaigns, both of which were created in 2019. The two campaigns managed to raise a combined 11,022,700 yen. This amounts to roughly $70,000 USD today, but was closer to $90,000 in 2019.
In January 2022, Pixel Co. director Hidekuni Sasaki revealed in a post on X that it was ceasing development on Steam Pilots, after allegedly not having received any form of payment in the two years they’d worked on the project. According to a representative at Makuake, the total amount from both crowdfunding campaigns had been fully passed to Furukawa at this stage. Two months after Sasaki’s initial statement, Furukawa announced through Steam Pilots’ second Makuake page that a second developer had been brought on to replace Pixel Co.
From there, a legal battle ensued. Pixel Co. launched a suit against Furukawa in March 2022, seeking to recoup its lost development costs. Furukawa launched a countersuit of his own in 2023, in which he sought compensation for damages and alleged emotional distress caused by Pixel Co.’s CEO.
As detailed in a report by Automaton, this all came to a head on January 30 when a Japanese court ruled that neither party would receive compensation for their alleged damages. However, Pixel Co.’s president has been ordered to pay Furukawa 40,000 yen (roughly $2,600) following his emotional distress lawsuit.
In a post on X, Pixel Co. stated that they find the ruling “to be deeply regrettable,” and that they believe the outcome “has the potential to cause serious disadvantages for the entire game industry.” Pixel Co. signed off by stating, “Regarding our future course of action, we will make an announcement at a later date. That is all.”
But while Steam Pilots is dead, out of the wreckage of that retro shoot ’em up was born Bounty Sisters, a very similar game that came to Switch in Japan just a couple of months ago.
