So the game did get created though right? It's $9.99 on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/281940/ It sounds like while the game got made, they aren't profitable and can't afford to make good on the kickstarter rewards.
“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
61–70 of 392 posts
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#62From TA:
"What about our Kickstarter backers?
The people that believed in us from the beginning? People we made promises too. People we have let down. Even worse… people we will not be able to give the full rewards they invested in.
The crazy thing is, that we have most of the rewards ready for postage. All the backer stickers and letters of enlistment just need a stamp. All the poster sets printed, signed and ready. The artbook is ready to be printed, the soundtrack is ready for distribution, the DVD case is ready for production. But we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and dvd-cases."
This could be a good closure. From comments:
"Fredrik Waage: Please honor your backers who believed in your game by releasing the DRM-free version like you promised so linux backers (hopefully via WINE) and ppl who don't like steam can enjoy your game."
Or maybe even go open source?
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#63I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
Properly estimating is probably one of the hardest things to do in our field, specially so if you are starting a product or company where you have to go with your gut for a lot of the decisions. I think the key to survive this is not so much learning to get estimates right, but being prepared for them to be wrong, that's probably why the "multiplicative factor" gets thrown around so often. The good thing is that the…
Properly estimating is not just difficult in your field, it's difficult anywhere in 'software' or tech. You always run into issues along the way, and you have to deal with them.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#64I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
Issues with estimating, particularly something like this, mostly comes down to meta-ignorance: you don't know what you don't know. Given a particular problem of a similar sort to something he's worked on, an experienced engineer will be able to list 10 different issues that might crop up. An inexperienced engineer won't know of those potential problems and will just see the most optimistic path possible. When you're…
I like that term 'meta ignorance'. It is important to realize that ignorance isn't "bad" it can be fixed by learning, but its good to know that you have it so you can start fixing it.
The other aspect of this that I see, even in seasoned engineers, is the 'presumption of simplicity'. Some things look really simple, but inside they are actually quite complicated. A smart phone is just a screen, a computer, a battery and a radio right? Too many times people see something, think "that doesn't look too hard I bet I could do that in a weekend"[1] but don't actually follow through on that thought and spend a weekend building what ever it was that was so easy. Sometimes the more experience you have the more dangerous this is. I can recall times in my own life we're I've grossly underestimated the difficulty of stuff, its lead me to be a lot more conscious about things I know about and things I think I know something about, especially when predicting schedules and work effort.
[1] A very common theme on acquihire stories here.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#65So if the game is on Steam right now and I try to support them by buying a copy, where does the money go?
The Intellectual Property (IP) will be listed as an 'asset' in the bankruptcy submission. Whoever picks up the IP will likely receive the money from the game on Steam, since they are the new owners of it. No different than if someone had bought out the studio (GRIN).
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#66It's interesting to see the reactions here. The matchstick project ended up giving full refunds to the backers and yet they were trashed in the comments. While here people are showing lots of love even after the bankrupt notification.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#67"But changing gameplay from 2D to 3D had a major impact on overall development cost (we found out a little too late)" Not to pile on, but this was very surprising to me... how could you not know that this would have a major impact?
> how could you not know that this would have a major impact?
Anybody starting a major project will be ignorant about some important things. It's impossible to do anything interesting and know everything up front; if you could know everything, then that would mean it had been done a zillion times before and therefore not be interesting.
There's also a strong selection bias. The kinds of people who don't take chances? They don't become entrepreneurs. They don't bet years of their lives on projects in hit-driven industries. Those who do take chances already know that so many of the things that previously seemed impossible or dangerous to them worked out to be fine.
So nobody should ever, ever, ever not start something because they don't know everything. The trick to successful entrepreneurship is to test your big risks early, so that your failures are small and recoverable, rather than late and fatal. Here their mistake wasn't underestimating the impact of 3D. It was in not testing their assumption before the public launch of the Kickstarter.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#68I wanted to believe that a team of 6 to 10 people could make a game that looked and felt AAA. Boy was I wrong! When we made Crash Bandicoot (with a team of 7), it was already virtually impossible to make a AAA game with 6-10 people, and that was 20 years ago. I tell inexperienced entrepreneurs to take their honest best estimate and multiply by 10. Or, as Mark Cerny (our producer on Crash) used to tell us, "add one an…
Also, the original kickstarter [1] was for $50,000 with $72,000 raised. I'm not an expert on the economics of the video game industry, but I can't believe that would pay a team of 6-10 people for very long. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/45588301/woolfe-the-red...
Agreed. That number should have been a red flag from the beginning.*
*unless this was a legitimate case of being 1 month away from launch.
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#69From TA: "What about our Kickstarter backers? The people that believed in us from the beginning? People we made promises too. People we have let down. Even worse… people we will not be able to give the full rewards they invested in. The crazy thing is, that we have most of the rewards ready for postage. All the backer stickers and letters of enlistment just need a stamp. All the poster sets printed, signed and ready.…
They say that the source is for sale along with the IP, so probably not
Re: “It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the original kickstarter [1] was for $50,000 with $72,000 raised. I'm not an expert on the economics of the video game industry, but I can't believe that would pay a team of 6-10 people for very long. [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/45588301/woolfe-the-red...
They're based on Antwerp, Belgium, That could make it work. Since the regular salary is $24k I'd expect it to be around $5k per person.
> Since the regular salary is $24k
Where did you take this number from?
Try at least, the bare minimum, double that in Western Europe for anyone calling themselves a game developer