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Ddraig posted:So I guess this has no publisher attached so it has no strings attached... apart from the strings of every entitled gently caress who donated money and now wants their idea in the game because god drat it they helped pay for this loving thing etc. If this project has only one failure mode, this is it. I would like to coin this kind of paid-community backlash as "the minecraft effect"  Granted, Minecraft already had a sort of Alpha build ready when he started taking donations. Anything after Minecraft officially went beta is roughly on par with the "preorders" that Double Fine is essentially selling now that they've hit their $400,000+ mark. Also it seems like Tim Schafer has quite a bit more business savvy and business management experience under his belt.
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Feb 9, 2012 18:44
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Spiky Ooze posted:At the end of the day those extremely obsessed critics will show up whether you've developed WoW, Assassin's Creed, Minecraft.... The key difference here is that games like WoW, Assassin's Creed and other commercial titles were only shown to the public/game journalists when they had reached a relatively high level of polish in the late beta stage. I guess it really hinges on how you view your "preorder" with games like these. Basic functions like item chests weren't even implemented when Notch opened up the game for preorders. When the game is at that early stage of development, and I hate to use this word, but some people feel entitled that their opinion might carry some weight with the developer. If you buy a game after it's functionally complete, complaining about features/functions carries (in my opinion) a lot less weight. You saw the trailer, maybe played the demo and probably read at least one review before making your purchase of the completed game. In this situation, at this point Double Fine has at best a concept (that they haven't shared) and probably a software framework from previous projects. Now, it's subjective, but investing money at this stage in the production process, even earlier than the Indev stage of Minecraft, many more people are definitely going to feel justified in getting involved and voicing their opinions loudly.
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Feb 9, 2012 19:20
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I am ok with that.
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Feb 9, 2012 19:33
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It wouldn't shock me if they end up with close to $2 million. There will be a sharp uptick in prepurchases (they aren't really contributions at this point) as people get off work and hit facebook/reddit/forums etc tonight. Also this: 
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Feb 9, 2012 20:29
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Bobby The Rookie posted:Screw that, point-and-click Psychonauts 2. Honestly, I think I would prefer this. I'm going to finally finish Psyconauts, but this time using a controller. Holy moley are some parts of that game impossible with a loving keyboard. It would also probably reduce the overhead cost by about 90%, but then you can't really market it to consoles without some sort of 3D element.
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Feb 9, 2012 21:53
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retail - almost always close to exactly 20%, they have a lot of overhead costs involved with brick and mortar distribution - 4-12% publisher - everything else, minus packaging, marketing and overhead etc developer - whatever the publisher will give them. this varies widely and can be a fixed amount, too.
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Feb 10, 2012 04:41
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$300,000 is six mid-level software developer's salary @ $60,000/yr, or 3 @ $80,000/yr + overhead (SF has a high cost of living). With a million dollars they can put eight high-end developers, artists & voice actors @ $100,000 + overhead and still make a profit. To put that in to perspective, using primitive coding tools and compilers, Quake 1 was developed by a team of 13, including Trent Renzor, over a period of about 2.5 years. An adventure game is considerably less than what I would consider "bleeding edge game engine technology". Hadlock fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 22:49
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Does Notch really have that much money? I thought he had like a couple million. I think conservative estimates put total sales at somewhere between $20 and $50 million USD. But swedish taxes are sort of insane (close to 60%, I think), so gross profits are something like $10-25 million. So you might better understand why people were dissapointed that minecraft's development sort of ground to a halt by May 2011. It also sets him up for an excellent position to fund/publish nearly an unlimited number of $150,000 indie games plus a couple of bigger titles.
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Feb 11, 2012 17:02
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You can point to Notch's sales numbers, but that's for a single product over four years. Minecraft is simply a runaway success. Scrolls is going to get crushed under the weight of expectations after Minecraft and end up in the same category as Dakitana or DNF. In four years iD Software had released Quake 1 (1996), Quake 2 (1997) and Quake 3 (1999). I see the sales numbers, but in four years they can point to (very) few indicators of progress. Who knows? Maybe they will pull a Valve and monetize one or two community mods (Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike) while they incubate a sequel six years later. I don't see that happening. Notch has a rocky history working as a grinder coder for other software companies; Gaben was a project manager at Microsoft for years before tackling video games. Kudos for Carl Manneh for securing exclusive deals with both Microsoft and Sony for minecraft and outsourcing development on those platforms, but he's either got to be tearing his hair out trying to get Notch to invest using their warchest or develop multiple games concurrently, or is actively shopping his resume at other companies. If Mojang manages to release Scrolls in 2012, they're worth another look but I just don't see the leadership in Notch. Farbtoner posted:Plus, Notch doesn't really have any business savvy at all. He managed to luck his way into making a game that made him a ton of money but he's consistently shown bad programming and business decisions and with Scrolls looking awful he probably doesn't have much of a long-term future in the gaming biz. Thank you for writing this, I've been trying to say this for about 2 years now and this is the most concise opinion I've read so far on the topic.
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Feb 11, 2012 21:37
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Rocketlex posted:Modern Warfare's a pretty good game and we're sure Homefront will do just as well! In a pre-MW2 era, I think Homefront probably would have been wildly successful. The problem is that nobody pays attention to multiplayer FPSes anymore unless they're the 800 lb gorilla. Somehow EA managed to carve themselves a chunk of that pie in BF3. I think when Homefront was first funded, it was a viable product in a vast market of military shooters. It's just that in the 2.5 years of development while they brought Homefront to market, the market changed in ways that nobody predicted (MW2 raking in over a billion dollars and essentially shutting out all other competitors for three years) and a game like Homefront was no longer competitive.
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Feb 12, 2012 07:59
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CS, CSS and (soon) TF2 all have half a decade on MW3, your argument is invalid.
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Feb 12, 2012 08:17
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404notfound posted:Yay Steam! Well, the beta will be through steam; steam beta != steam retail release. It does grease the wheels significantly, though. cmykjester posted:(also I kind of hate how pretty much every movie trailer nowadays copies that whole WHAMMMMMMMMMMM noise that the inception trailer does) I'm pretty sure that's just a bunch of horns playing/blasting B flat in a church somewhere in England. You hear it a lot in French and Russian orchestral music, it's been popular for a while. robot roll call posted:Still, notch will probably invest anyways because he seems like kind of a moron. I'm surprised he hasn't blown his fortune on a castle filled with nerf guns already, to be honest. This is probably the funniest thing I've read all day. I've been loosely following Notch's misadventures in business and have to agree with you about his business sense. If Psychonauts gets funded, it will probably at best break even as a direct 3D sequel. Someone else suggested a sort of episodic thing like what Tell Tale games does. I think either that (with bonus TF2 hats!  ) or some sort of 2D Monkey Island-style adventure is the only way to get someone to seriously fund Psychonauts 2. Personally I would pay full price for the 2D Monkey Island-style version; but wait for the 3D version to go on sale.
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Feb 16, 2012 08:51
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Der Shovel posted:Everyone who was paying attention knew that Jurassic Park was going to be poo poo long before it came out. The final nail in the coffin was when they delayed it for like 7 months mere weeks before it was supposed to ship. What was the story behind this game? It seemed really odd that they would revisit this IP so long after the last sequel had been released. When I first heard of it coming to steam, I thought maybe someone had ported the old shoot-em-up arcade game to PC or something.
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Feb 17, 2012 10:23
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A new Jurassic park trilogy? Well then, a tell tale game must have been a drop in the bucket as an expense out of the movie's marketing budget.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:24
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Does Tim Schafer sail or something? I couldn't help but notice that sitting behind Tim was what is almost certainly a remnant of a kevlar sail. I realize that they on occasion will make bags and other items out of old sails, but generally they only sell those items to sailors. Also SF is sort of the regional sailing mecca so,
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Feb 25, 2012 10:58
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So is the wasteland kickstarter going to include a free copy of Wasteland 1, so I know where the story is picking up from? If not, who is selling the digital version?
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Mar 10, 2012 09:11
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Has DF given a launch date of act 2 yet? The engine, primary story, art direction and scripting were all sorted out in Act 1, it seems like Act 2 should have been a slam dunk by now.
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Aug 26, 2014 06:42
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Kudos to Tim for trying to grow his company faster than organically, but four games at one time seems like stretching it for a company their size. That's a lot for one company, especially since they're all single player which don't lend themselves to strong sales over an extended period of time.
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Nov 23, 2014 02:26
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So, as mentioned, it's been a very long time since the first half was released, Was the intention to use broken age's engine as a baseline engine for future point and click adventure games? From the parts of the documentary I saw, they were building the engine from the ground up. Presumably the way they structured the releases, and going through the trouble of building a new engine, they were creating a platform to more quickly (at least in theory) release new point and click adventures.
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Nov 30, 2014 21:37
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Megazver posted:But is it really (10 times the budget x 3 times shorter) 30 times better than a Daedalic game? Hey man, this is an argument about business decisions in video games, you can't just walk in here and drop a bunch of hard numbers like that this isn't some economic summit, you jerk.
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Dec 5, 2014 10:43
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