Obsidian Entertainment - Baldur's Gate 3 Almost Made in 2008

Agree… and remember that they only asked for US$1.1 million which is ridiculously modest.

$1.1 million is ridiculously modest. That said, you're leaping to some weird conclusions and just presenting it as a fact that they (I assume both inXile and Obsidian) expanded the budget with bank or other loans. We have no evidence they've done so. I'm really pretty sure they haven't. I could check, I guess, or you could ask Sawyer or someone else on formspring, but I'm pretty sure neither studio is doing that.

Yes it's supposedly a Wheel of Time game but there is hardly any info right now. I'm starting to think it's another failed project.

Wheel of Time? Man. That fell through ages ago. If there is any other project it's not something we've heard about.
 
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25 million is kinda bullshit though. Assuming its infinity engine again most the work is already done. Plonk in some new NPCs with some copy/pasted tweaked scripts. Have a great time designing a DND campaign like a PNP player would do as a hobby. Should see what the community did with NWN toolkit for free.
I can imagine them looking at the guys on Duke Forever back then thinking "man, they got it made!"
 
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25 million is kinda bullshit though.

What? 25 million is pretty much the standard budget for a modern AAA game, especially an RPG. BioWare's games are probably a ways over 25 million a head, and Bethesda's games well over. Again, they were asking for that kind of money because they wanted to do something like DA:O. You really think they were pitching "we want to do an Infinity Engine game!" to Atari. Really?!
 
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Guys please... They just wanted enough cash from the start instead of getting stuck or negotiating for more later. I don't think their plan was use 1-5 mils for the game and the rest toss into Obama presidential campaign or something like that.
 
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$1.1 million is ridiculously modest. That said, you're leaping to some weird conclusions and just presenting it as a fact that they (I assume both inXile and Obsidian) expanded the budget with bank or other loans. We have no evidence they've done so. I'm really pretty sure they haven't. I could check, I guess, or you could ask Sawyer or someone else on formspring, but I'm pretty sure neither studio is doing that.

I have no idea how you are leaping to the "weird" conclusion that I was presenting anything as "fact" when I clearly stated that "my guess" (you may want to check a dictionary for the meaning of the word "guess") is that they used the crowdfunding capital in order to get a bank loan.

My guess, however, is based on real-life experience. So while it may still be a guess, I'd consider it a fairly educated one. I was certainly not presenting anything as fact though.
As for my real-life experience, I personally own a stake in a small cap company and after a major customer bailed out of a contract earlier this year, this company was in desperate need of a credit.
Ever since the worldwide financial crisis, banks aren't exactly lining up to grant credits to small caps so the bank demanded that the owners of the company (including myself) should raise the company's own capital by a few €100K. The bank wanted to consider granting a credit only if these conditions were met.

So... based on this real-life experience and my general and personal knowledge of how banks "tick" these days, I would not be overly surprised if Obsidian used the crowdfunding capital in order to obtain a credit under unknown conditions.
They might have also approached a private equity fund (in fact, most banks, probably including Obsidian's home bank, have their own PE divisions these days) and got the money from there after presenting the capital they raised from the crowdfunding campaign.

It is a known fact that Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games have an additional source of funding in addition to the crowdfunding (which stands at over US$7 million right now).
Chris Roberts has not revealed who the other investors are but from everything that has been revealed he is obviously tied up in a business relationship where he needed to prove to the unknown investors via the crowdfunding campaign that there was a substantial public interest in getting Star Citizen to be made.

On a whole I'd consider a budget of US$1.1 million -which is what Obsidian originally asked for- laughable at best. Unless Obsidian has taught their devs some crazy Yoga and survival techniques, I don't see how a game of PE's scope could be made in 18 months time with that budget and not even with the US$4+ million they managed to raise eventually. There is just no way. There must be another source of funding, whether it is a bank loan, private equity or their super-secret treasure chest ;) .
 
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I have no idea how you are leaping to the "weird" conclusion that I was presenting anything as "fact" when I clearly stated that "my guess"

(…)

There is just no way. There must be another source of funding, whether it is a bank loan, private equity or their super-secret treasure chest ;) .

Uh-huh.

Anyway, why don't you ask? inXile has an ask a dev going, JE Sawyer has a formspring. Don't draw your own conclusions and then present them as fact. Ask.
 
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I agree with Moriendor. Some of those huge kickstarters have outside investors or other income. Its not a crime or illegal so I cant see why people can't accept it does happen.
 
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I don't see how a game of PE's scope could be made in 18 months time with that budget and not even with the US$4+ million they managed to raise eventually. There is just no way. There must be another source of funding, whether it is a bank loan, private equity or their super-secret treasure chest ;) .

I do agree that PE's scope is huge and I have no idea how they are going to pull it off in 18 months, secret investor or not. Sometimes it's not about the amount of people you can throw at a project, there are certain bottlenecks that are more or less fixed. For example, their endless paths dungeon is just a small part of their game but that's actually a huge piece of content that has to be made and tested a gazillion times. The endless paths could be a game in itself, more or less Torchlight.
 
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I think it was Adam Brenneke who answered this question before. He mentioned that 13years ago it would take 2-3 days to make just one 2d background, but with the tech we have now the process takes just 2-3 hours! They can make the game(PE) both cheaper and faster compared to what they would have done a decade ago.
 
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I assume Obsidian is throwing some of their own money on the project. Either that or a straight up loan. $4M would let you hire at most 15 people for 18 months. A project like PE easily has twice as many involved due to all the stuff that needs to be done beyond development - marketing, project management etc.

However, it's safe to assume they're going to sell quite a bit more than the current pre-order KS sales, so it's not like their total PE income will be $4M. They can probably spend a good $10M on it and still make a healthy profit in the end.
 
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PE is a 15-20 dev project, that is Obsidian's plan from the beginning. It have been mentioned numerous time by Feargus and Adam during the Kickstarter.
 
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Obsidian has already announced they're going to have an expansion pack, which has separate funding from the KS.
 
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PE is a 15-20 dev project, that is Obsidian's plan from the beginning. It have been mentioned numerous time by Feargus and Adam during the Kickstarter.
With at least 4-5 of them being senior designers who is going to be actually making the game and all that content?
 
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Dear Green Place
Not above making content but you'd expect some actual manpower being assigned to each of their areas so that the production would correspond to Obsidian's size and the stated ambitions. 15 devs is even less than PB.
 
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Dear Green Place
I'm not a development expert but everyone keeps saying that modern tools make content generation faster. I'd certainly expect a top-down game like this to be easier than a 3rd-person open-world game and the age difference gap is (presumably) reduced because this won't be a AAA++ production. I also don't think Obsidian's size has anything to do with it - I think MCA, Sawyer, Cain etc will be deep into working directly on content.
 
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I also don't think Obsidian's size has anything to do with it -
I'm not sure if that's how the backers felt, obviously the reputation of the designers was the leading factor but them being backed by the company that produced FNV & Motb was at least assuring. I can easily understand the cost going down due to the relative technical ease of creating PE and the reduced production time but having the developer numbers being that limited really does strengthen the view that PE is going to be closer (scale-wise?/quality-wise? hopefully not) to an indie game than what Obsidian usually do.
 
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Dear Green Place
To me, they clearly promised an Infinity-like game, so that's what I expect. By modern AAA standards, I would think that is close to an indie, so, yes, polished/professional indie (insert the best term for this) is right. If someone expects F:NV, that's their own fault, surely.
 
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