Link to last month's discussion of this story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3847373
What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#42Software development on a budget of $30k getting described as lavish. Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, but cute. "You're doing your shoestring budget wrong! You should listen to me! I've never shipped anything longer than a blog comment but my years of experience as a pir^H^H^H consumer mean I really know this job well!"
P.S. A business where the successful outcome is the principals end up in personal debt is neither a business nor successful.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nar, a game as great looking as theirs would get the press anyhow. The press are dying for more interesting games to write about. You raise another good point though, not only is it 3k, but its 5-6 days at 12+ hours. A whole week of dev time lost to the event. Events are great fun, but if you don't have money you don't know what to do with, I don't think they are a very good investment. Not much bang for the buck I d…
I've been in the fairly unique situation of seeing the results a wide range of companies in the extended games industry (from top games publishers to indies to gaming hardware... etc.) got from exhibiting their products and I couldn't disagree more about it being a good investment.
Hey Corin, I'd love to hear more about why you think so. I'm always trying to work out how to best spend my marketing money (and energy).
Do you have any metrics you can share about how an appearance at a show relate to final game sales? Or even press coverage?
For example, if they were to spend that money on banner advertising they could generate say 6-10k clicks through to their website.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#44Damnit people. I've lost track of how many times the Star Command Kickstarter story has been misrepresented. The implication is that only $4000 (post tax) was spent on the game and that's an outright lie. They spent 6k on music, 5k on marketing (poster + pax), and 1k to development/demo hardware. That's not necessarily ideal but it's not entirely unreasonable either. You can argue the marketing/hardware issue perhaps…
Huh, seems like a perfect representation that very little money actually went to development to me! Sounds like they didn't do their sums. Also how did they spend so much money on incorporation, costs about £25 ($40) over here.
> costs about £25 ($40) over here
That makes me droll. Costs around $500~1k here.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been in the fairly unique situation of seeing the results a wide range of companies in the extended games industry (from top games publishers to indies to gaming hardware... etc.) got from exhibiting their products and I couldn't disagree more about it being a good investment.
Hey Corin, I'd love to hear more about why you think so. I'm always trying to work out how to best spend my marketing money (and energy). Do you have any metrics you can share about how an appearance at a show relate to final game sales? Or even press coverage? For example, if they were to spend that money on banner advertising they could generate say 6-10k clicks through to their website.
Press coverage - not metrics, but I've seen an awful lot of stories come out of events, and most importantly an awful lot of journalists meeting exhibitors, from bloggers to mainstream websites or newspapers. Obviously this doesn't guarantee coverage, but it puts the ball in your hands, once you're stood talking to a journalist while standing over your product it's time to knock it out of the park.
I don't really have any customer data I can share with you, the sort of selling points generally used are more vague - such as "The average spend per visitor at last year's event on products sourced at the show was £767, a total audience spend of £79.8m" (taken from the sales pitch of a 2012 event). The overall focus of selling - though I'm not actually in sales so this isn't my direct area - is about the size of the audience, and what sort of demographic they are.
I don't know if events are a good use of your money when it's as tight as that, i.e. if you can chose between $3k on an event or $3k on a PR company, but only one, as I can't think of any exhibitor I've ever had that paid that little, or that was small enough not to have marketing budget around it.
The single biggest argument I can give, I think, is that if you go to PAX you're going to get more people looking at your game than you'd get clicks for $3k online - and when it comes down to it, are you going to sell your game better by having somebody look at your website, or stand in front of you try out your game?
Incidentally, what adverts are giving you that click-rate, and do you have any calculated CPA figures?
edit: I just want to note that like I said above, my experience comes more from big budget companies like big studio publishers rather than indies, so I can't necessarily say events are or aren't a great idea for people like you, just that they do offer bang for buck.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the indie games business and I can say they overpaid for everything. 6K for music should be 1-2k at most! Poster Art - What's wrong with those awesome sprites that Kotaku used. Should be 0. IPads? More that one? PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense. This is why they say so many people don't make their money back in the App Store any more. You can't spend indie money like you work for…
"PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense." For a game developer? No, it's a fantastic way to raise the profile of your game. You get the most avid gamers interested in your game (who will spread the word if they like the game) and you get press coverage too. For an exhibitor PAX isn't a 3 day vacation, it's 5 or 6 days of working 12+ hours days, most of them staying chained to their booth in th…
But it's a lot of money tho. If your goal is marketing, then isn't it a more efficient cost per user acquisition to just buy adwords or whatever online ads instead?
$3k is a lot of ad impressions.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, seems like a perfect representation that very little money actually went to development to me! Sounds like they didn't do their sums. Also how did they spend so much money on incorporation, costs about £25 ($40) over here.
They are a three man team working without any pay. What did you expect the money to go to? Proper salaries and benefits for the team would be a few hundred thousand dollars, not 36k. Spending $6000 on music counts 100% as "to development" and is perfectly reasonable. For PAX if anything they should have spent more money to create a bigger presence.
I'm genuinely curious as to how much music $6000 bought. That can afford quite a decent-length soundtrack.
For not-very-well known composers, I've been quoted in the range of $150-250/minute for music. I assume that if I went a bit higher up the chain (small-time, but established) that the price would rise.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#48Software development on a budget of $30k getting described as lavish. Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, but cute. "You're doing your shoestring budget wrong! You should listen to me! I've never shipped anything longer than a blog comment but my years of experience as a pir^H^H^H consumer mean I really know this job well!" P.S. A business where the successful outcome is the prin…
> Ahh, gamers, they're so cute. Poorly-informed over-entitled misanthropes, but cute.
As a gamer, I completely agree with you here. The entitlement has grown rapidly over the past 2-3 years, and in my opinion is only hurting those in the industry looking to be adventurous.
Something like Minecraft might be the exception, but look at the shenanigans surrounding the Mass Effect 3 ending (which was not as bad as some would have you believe)—BioWare is releasing DLC to re-work something that was just a clash between (entitled) gamers who interpreted advertising in their own way, and the artistic direction of those who made the game. Considering the backlash, do these gamers think a studio like BioWare (or publisher like EA) will risk a game that isn't just a Call of Duty sequel again? Sure, but the chances are less, and the resultant game is going to tread a significantly less-risky path.
The comments regarding the $1000 (nothing!) spent on iPad hardware are just inane.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#49>Leaving us with around $6000, which is income, so that was taxed That's just bad accounting. Making a game costs more than $35k. There should be nothing left to tax.
And why does making a game cost more than $35k? Because you need to pay the people making the game so they can eat and pay rent. And what do we call the money that we give people for that purpose? Income. Which is taxed.
Re: What the hell these game developers did with your kickstarter money
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
"PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense." For a game developer? No, it's a fantastic way to raise the profile of your game. You get the most avid gamers interested in your game (who will spread the word if they like the game) and you get press coverage too. For an exhibitor PAX isn't a 3 day vacation, it's 5 or 6 days of working 12+ hours days, most of them staying chained to their booth in th…
But it's a lot of money tho. If your goal is marketing, then isn't it a more efficient cost per user acquisition to just buy adwords or whatever online ads instead? $3k is a lot of ad impressions.
It's virtually impossible to make AdWords work for their business model, and if it were not impossible it would require someone intelligent to implement, and unlike game developers SEM specialists expect to get paid on a regular basis.
This is largely a function of the unit economics of indie games being terrible compared to e.g. the unit economics of a free to play MMORPG.