Hero-U - Interview @KickstartVentures

Gorath

Prime Evil
Staff Member
Moderator
Original Sin Donor
Original Sin 2 Donor
Joined
August 30, 2006
Messages
7,830
A new interview about Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption can be found at KickstartVentures.

You’ve admitted that the $400,000 originally asked for wasn’t enough to get Hero-U fully funded. Why did you undersell it and not ask for closer to what was originally estimated to cost?

Kickstarter is all-or-nothing financing. Had we asked for $800K or $1 million, the answer would have been “nothing”. We asked for as much as we thought we had a reasonable chance of receiving, and nearly failed at that. It took last minute heroics from many of our backers to creep over the finish line.

If I had it to do over, the goal would have been $150K, and we would not have promised a finished game. That would have covered a tech demo, artwork, and design that we could show in a second Kickstarter for the actual game. Instead, we did it backwards, raising $400K without anything like a game demo to show, and asking $100K now to make the game shine.

The successful Kickstarters since 2012 have been based on games already in an advanced development state. Chris Roberts raised over $2 million, and spent 2 years working on a prototype before coming to Kickstarter with Star Citizen. Yooka-Laylee is well into development and showing a polished play experience.

We used the Tim Schafer model of waving our arms and saying we had a great idea. Try to get $1,000 on a pitch like that today! Even in 2012, it was not enough to raise $800K for a couple of game designers without an established development house.
More information.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
7,830
Ok, I hate having to bag on this project again, but I really have an issue with the level of integrity on display here. This is what they told their backers in their original kickstarter campaign:

"Our goal is the minimum budget with which we can make a high-quality game."

One of their backer tiers states:

"Freshman: You will receive a DRM-free digital game download, access to discussion forums to help us improve the game, and your name will appear on the Hero list.
Estimated delivery: Oct 2013"

So, according to their campaign, backers were promised delivery of a high-quality game by October 2013 if they reached their funding target.

Now, they are saying this:

"The original game budget was $650K, based on looking at the budgets of Shannara, Jolly Rover, and MacGuffin’s Curse. We asked only $400K (which was $275K net after rewards and expenses) because we felt that was the limit of what we could ask on Kickstarter. We always intended to supplement that with angel investment, a loan, or a second crowdfunding drive. You can’t make a game like Hero-U for $300K unless most of the team members do the work without pay.

And this:

"Kickstarter is all-or-nothing financing. Had we asked for $800K or $1 million, the answer would have been “nothing”. We asked for as much as we thought we had a reasonable chance of receiving, and nearly failed at that. It took last minute heroics from many of our backers to creep over the finish line."

If I were a backer, I'd be really pissed off right now.

According to this quote, they set the funding target according to how much money they thought they could GET from backers, NOT what they thought they really NEEDED to finish the game. They say they ALWAYS intended to try to get more money later to finish the game. Were the original backers told that the kickstarter target would not be enough to complete the game? Didn't the developers have an obligation to make this information a part of their campaign?

If you look at their NEW Kickstarter, they give an entirely different explanation for why they need more money:

"However, as we started to get feedback from our backers, we realized that the majority of them wanted a game more like Quest for Glory, the award-winning game series that Lori and I developed in the 1990s. Hero-U has evolved into a much larger and more expensive project."

Wait a minute. According to the interview, the original vision of the game was estimated to cost 650K. The current vision of the game is budgeted at 535K (with the two kickstarters combined). So in actuality, the game the backers ASKED for, and which the project has evolved into (the current version) is budgeted LOWER, not HIGHER, than the original.

And which is it? Is it because the original budget was more than the original funding goal and they always intended to get more money to finish the game? Or is it because "we're doing it for the backers, they wanted a different game than the one we kickstarted and now it has evolved into something more expensive"?

At best, the developers do not seem to be competent in planning, developing and executing their game. At worst, they duped their backers into funding a game that they knew wouldn't be finished at the targeted amount.

According to the interview, they seem to have problems holding on to competent programmers. Programmers would seem to me to be pretty important to coding a game. But instead of hiring programmers under conditions that would allow them to be reliable and to deliver to a standard (i.e. a contract), they almost seem to be treating it like a volunteer effort. I suspect their programming budget is nowhere near what is needed and all they can get are programmers who are willing to work for peanuts - you get what you pay for. Most of their budget has been spent on 3D assets that were contracted out to a 3rd party to create.

Also according to the interview, they don't even have a vision of the KIND of game they event want to create! They funded a isometric 2D game - then they changed to a DIFFERENT type of game (full 3D) after the kickstarter closed. Then they spent 6 months on a demo that no one liked. Now they are back to 2D. When asked "What assurances can you give that it won't change again", their reply was: "Can we promise we won’t change from isometric to full 3D? No. We don’t intend to change currently, but I won’t promise that." WTF? They are several years into development and have gone through 400K and they still don't know what the visuals will be like?

What happens to the original backers if the second Kickstarter fails?

"We don’t expect the campaign to fail. If it does, we will get more expensive credit than we have currently – loans against our life insurance and retirement savings, and credit card loans. We have many resources of this type, but they are costly and dangerous. If we use them, our exposure will be total – If the game sells poorly, it would bankrupt us. My big concern is that if we are presenting this Kickstarter campaign so poorly that we can’t get $100K in funding, it would also be a message from fans that they are not interested in the game. And that suggests the game will not sell well, and we would not be able to recover most of that debt. This campaign will help measure the degree of interest in the Hero-U game."

Reading between the lines here - the 2nd kickstarter is not funded = there is not enough interest in Hero-U = we won't take on the debt and bankrupt ourselves.

They have spent 400K and been in development for a few years, it's a little late to be gauging interest in the game at this stage, isn't it? If they weren't confident enough in their game to ask for the full estimated development costs on the original kickstarter, shouldn't that have told them whether or not there was sufficient interest in the game for it to be fully funded and profitable? Why is this a factor $400,000 and several years later??

If the delivery of the game to the original backers was always dependent on their receiving additional funding, shouldn't they have been told all this upfront?
 
Joined
Nov 12, 2010
Messages
516
Just because I hate to do it doesn't mean I have nothing to say. :p

And I do hate to do it, because these are the guys who gave us the QUEST FOR GLORY series, and because I like seeing the resurgence of RPGs that Kickstarter has helped provide us.

But kickstarter will only be a viable platform when developers are honest and upfront with backers in their campaigns. People not being upfront deserve to be called out. Also, they are asking for another 100K, people should know about the past issues with the project before they throw cash blindly at them based on nostalgia for QUEST FOR GLORY.
 
Joined
Nov 12, 2010
Messages
516
It's a good analysis of the discrepanties between the goals and the way funds have been spent. I don't think the Coles are being dishonest or insincere here, just inexperienced with this part of game development. While I won't back Hero-U, I do hope it all works out for them and their backers in the end. I certainly think the current 3D-iteration of the game looks nice compared to the earlier concept.
 
Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
173
Location
the Netherlands
While I imagine this kind of consideration goes on with a lot of Kickstarters it does kind of drop your jaw for someone to so casually admit it like they didn't do anything wrong.
 
Joined
Aug 22, 2011
Messages
270
Location
The Desert
That's the part that boggles me - they seem like nice enough people, but they don't seem to understand that it's kind of messed up to not tell the original backers that the target would probably not be enough to finish the game, or to use "backers wanted a different game so we needed more money" as the reason more money is needed. I appreciate the honesty about the problems during development but that and all the other development problems makes me feel like they don't really know what they are doing.

Still hope a great game comes out in the end and that it serves as valuable experience for them for any future projects.
 
Joined
Nov 12, 2010
Messages
516
Hmmm, this "backers wanted a different game"-thing that really troubles the most.
I was a backer and I really knew what game I wanted: another Quest for Glory game with a different name.

Honestly, I don't care about the art style that much (I got used to vomit-inducing indie projects, heh-heh, so I'm perfectly okay with B-quality looks).
I do care about the story, puzzles, witty humor, characters... y'know, what made QfG a fan favorite -- and frankly, I don't see any of it so far.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2008
Messages
820
Back
Top Bottom