“It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed”

This was an episodic game they've released Vol 1 which was met with some quite poor reviews due to gameplay issues.

They could not push out Vol 2 nor the Kickstarter rewards as they pretty much ran out of money.

I actually wonder if in such cases Kickstarter shouldn't back the shipping or demand getting the a hold of the rewards and try to some how compensate the backers.

Heck with the amount of projects which fail they can pretty much have a monthly loot crate going on with the crap received from failed kickstartups...

Tho if they file for bankruptcy i wonder if giving the rewards away will not count against them as they devalued their fixed assets value just before or after filing for bankruptcy.

Steve Mcconnell has a great book on software estimation, but it's about enterprise software, where there are requirements and goals. [ http://www.stevemcconnell.com/est.htm ]

The biggest problem with making games is the fact that there's no end goal of "Done." It's just a vague point in time, really. Is it done when you've made 10 levels or 11? Is it done when you've added 10 power-ups or 11, or 15? In a movie, you can't make the thing 50 hours long, no one would watch it all. But for a game, 50 hours is now considered medium sized, compared to MMO's and MOBAs that offer hundreds of hours of time to play.

Scope creep is the biggest danger in the games industry. Reading this update, where they talk about going from 2D to 3D, my heart broke. That's such a major change, and as he writes, such a major uptick in difficulty, it was the beginning of the end.

Terry Cavanaugh [http://distractionware.com/blog/ ] gets scope right. Valve gets scope right. You can tell when it's done right because the pacing of the game feels damn near perfect, like Half-Life 2: there's little down time, and you're always moving forward, even if yer not always shooting.

I feel bad for the Woolfe team, but they clearly had rose colored glasses on. There's a very good reason modern console games cost at least 8 figures. Hell, even with 8 figures of budget, many big name titles aren't even that good. The games industry is a harsh mistress. Like judging what's funny for a comedian, judging what's fun for a game developer is the toughest task they have.

Hey! Of course I would find you commenting on HN! Did you end up finding a place to live or are you coming back to Tokyo :p I ended up going to Singapore and coming back.

I don't have data to back this up other than years of entrepreneurship. I'm sure someone could invest the time to dig-up the data and corroborate or refute my statement.

I think game development must rank way up there with restaurants in terms of business failure rates. It might even be worst than restaurants but the data could be impossible to collect.

Why?

Because restaurant failures are a matter of public record while game developers more often fail privately. The data simply evaporates. It's a really tough business, even with money.

For the most part lack of business experience and idealism or hubris can play a big role in this. The good old "the market is billions, if we only grab 0.1%" fallacy.

To be sure, hubris and doing something because you love it has it's place and fortunes have been made because of this. That said, the cold hard reality is that the gaming industry is paved with the corpses of probably millions of entrepreneurial efforts who have tried and failed.

Generally speaking, for most developers, I think there's far more money in developing games for those who have cash to burn (whether successfully or not) than to try to create the next blockbuster.

As a small data point, years ago we were approached by a company to develop an iOS children's game for them. Lots of animation, sound, graphics creation, etc. They had no experience in software development at all. They wanted to convert this low budget cartoon character into a game because they convinced themselves they'd make millions with an app.

We told them it would cost $50K to $250K (or more) and months of development depending on specs. Of course, they had no specifications. It would be impossible to understand costs without a solid spec.

We also recommended they DO NOT develop this game and stick to their core business. In fact we pushed back hard on this point. I sat down with the CEO for a couple of hours to explain failure rates, challenges, issues, etc. They needed to fundamentally transform their company and were not equipped to do so at the time.

I got an angry email from the CEO telling me we were crooks and how they found a company in India that could build them the entire game for just $15K in three months. What the hell did I know? Right?

A year later, almost to the day, I got an email from the same CEO asking if we could meet. We did. He revealed they burned the $15K and got nothing more than a slideshow made with templates. They then found a larger company (also in India) and burned an additional $50K and got something that was buggy and wasn't even playable. By the time he asked me for a meeting they had burned through over $150K trying to have their game made and had nothing. They couldn't even submit it to the app store. They were nearly out of money.

You could probably guess what happened next. He asked if we could fix it for $20K. I explained I'd be surprised if anyone would have any interest in touching that code-base for any amount of money. And, no, $20K couldn't even touch building the app they envisioned a year earlier. I repeated my recommendation to stick to their core business. Which they did. After learning an expensive lesson.

Anyhow, long story to relate one type of scenario behind game development where ignorance and hubris meet a pile-o-cash and a bonfire follows.

Sorry to see the Woolfe team fail. I don't think I am being a pessimist when I say this is far more likely to be the outcome with games. Kudos for trying. Move on. Quickly.

Meta-stupidity actually has another term for it as well - the Dunning-Kruger effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect - people that are inexperienced in a topic don't know what they don't know (as you put it, meta-stupidity) and so think they're smarter than they actually are - people that are more knowledgable know how vast the topic is, so realize their knowledge is less compared to overall knowledge, even though they're better than average.

Part of why it's good to be cautious around self-proclaimed experts.