Kickstarter budgets & Shadowrun Returns

Roq said:

But something doesn't add up here - if they had got their original $400k they'd be net -200k at least after buying the licence.

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I don't think that $600k number is correct. The $1.2 after all those deductions is $700k. Kickstarter takes 5%, which was $95k and Amazon apparently is in the 3-5% range (I'd expect 5% for larger projects like this). The math with a $600k licensing fee just doesn't add up. That $1.2 m number is an official number pulled from the Shadowrun development blog.

http://harebrained-schemes.com/post/jordans-developer-diary-power-to-the-people/

Roq said:

There's an interesting parallel with Chris Taylor's project Wildman. CT thought he needed $10m to make a full scale RTS game (Kings & castles) and so concocted a make work project, Wildman, to try and keep Gas Powered Games afloat. On the other hand Planetary Annihilation (Uber) asked for $900k (the same budget as Wildman) to make a full scale RTS and ended up with over $2m. That's still just 1/5 of CT's projected budget…

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Not familiar enough with either group to agree or counter point here.

Semi tangent: Just curious, how do the team sizes & scope compare? Obviously costs more money to have more employees (assuming similar avg pay). Trying to think what a good formula would be for comparison purposes.

# of Employees * Avg pay / Content + quality would give us avg price for production but, it'd be impossible to get a true numerical value for content & quality =(

Maylander said:

Teams tend to grow exponentially once you demand a certain level of production values. That's why some can get a lot out of a little - it's almost all programming with only one or two artists doing the graphics. Once you decide to get decent quality graphics and sounds, the scenario changes considerably,as it takes an artist quite some time to create a single, high quality model.

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This is also very true. A lot of people on Steam were complaining about lack of Voice Acting, I think that would have been murder on the budget. Something like Frozen Synapse is also a lot cheaper on art assests than hand painted character portraits.

I agree and it doesn't make sense to make high production values a priority.

Well, it DOES make sense if you're in it for the buck.

But the advantage of the Kickstarter model is PRECISELY that people are not expecting state of the art production values. It's exactly why you don't need a publisher in the first place.

This is why it's really sad that production values is exactly what's getting the most favorable responses, even from the most hardcore gamers.

Then again, it's also somewhat revealing.

Games like Shadowrun and Grimrock have enjoyed great success because of production values - and I have zero doubt in my mind about that.

Even if we pretend they're great games (and I don't mind that we do) - they still wouldn't have sold anywhere close to that well without strong production values.

That's sad.

Though it just dawned on me, maybe wages / man hours would give us a better idea of project efficiency. Comparing quality would be subjective.

greywolf00 said:

Though it just dawned on me, maybe wages / man hours would give us a better idea of project efficiency. Comparing quality would be subjective.

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Are you seriously suggesting that 1 man hour will result in similar output - no matter the man, the team, the position and the project?

No. Inaccurate as it'd be, it'd at least be a starting point better than guessing I think. Doesn't truly matter, we'd never get the numbers for the comparison anyway, just rambling.

greywolf00 said:

No. Inaccurate as it'd be, it'd at least be a starting point better than guessing I think. Doesn't truly matter, we'd never get the numbers for the comparison anyway, just rambling.

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It might be interesting in any case - but no, such numbers are impossible to come by

DArtagnan said:

Games like Shadowrun and Grimrock have enjoyed great success because of production values - and I have zero doubt in my mind about that.

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This sadly is true.If SRR had graphics like already mentioned Underrail for example I can bet that they would have 10% or less of current sale.Same thing for Grimrock if it had graphic like Sword and sorcery underworld.Neither of those game are bad I think that SRR is ok and Grimrock is good puzzler with RPG elements, but they owe much of their success to production values.

Nameless one said:

One of problems that Shdowrun returns had is that they had to give lot of money for licences it was around 600k IIRC.Second they don't sound like very skilled team since they couldn't get looting form corpses and save anywhere to work.Also they had only concept while most other KS have already started projects.

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If my memory serves, they talked about looting corpses in an interview, and said that that was not something that they really wanted in the game. And that actually makes sense in the shadowrun setting. Would you really want to loot that gun if you know that there is a large chance of it having at tracking device of some kind, or something that makes it useless to anyone but the intended owner? And walking around with a piece of equipment with the Renraku logo on it is like asking for trouble.
Save system though is annoying.

Gloo said:

Legend of Grimrock should serve as a standard meter for such indie projects, that's for sure a very good reference !

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LoG was nothing short if amazing. I don't think we can hold that one up as some form of baseline, instead it is clearly one of the highest points of comparison on the indie scene.

Maylander said:

It's one of the reasons I first doubted Kickstarter. Creating full blown games with decent production values for $1M is very challenging. Luckily, the bigger projects (Torment, PE, etc) got 4x that amount so they might actually be able to pull it off.

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It is important to realize that what they get from the kickstarter is not the entire budget. Many of these kickstarter projects are from companies/people who have already invested quite a bit in the project, or at least are about to do so, so the kickstarter only accounts for a part of the total budget.

As far as I know, the money is also going to the expansion as well. So we have the base game, editor, and expansion. Not a bad amount of product, especially if they get a lot of the things the editor can do into the official expansion.

I think the effort for the editor should probably not be understimated, and that definitely was part of the original vision and pitch. It's easy to dismiss that with a "but i just care for the campaign" but it had to be developed, tested, and polished just the same. From various dev comments over the years I conclude that preparig a consumer-ready editor is a major project in itself and I would not be surprised if up to a third of their man-hours went into that part of the project.

And well 15 months really is not much. Don't forget that Grimrock had a long prior history with slow and partial development, before they set down to work on it in earnest. Conquistadors kickstarted to get money to polish their already mostly developed game.
Still, I wold agree that SRR can't have been the best managed project and can't have the most experienced team, all things accounted for it still stands that the released campaign is fun but also a very simple, short and linear-to-a-fault affair. But FFS - isn't KS about giving new teams a chance? Now they have a platform to work from, money to fund further projects, gained experience... I'm personally looking forward to what is to follow.
And even with the mild dissapointment that is dead mans switch, plenty of people are quite content with it (while others are clearly not). Me, as a backer I will still get the Berlin DLC as part of what I "paid" for, so strictly speaking I can only evaluate the whole package once that is delivered as well.

GhanBuriGhan said:

I think the effort for the editor should probably not be understimated, and that definitely was part of the original vision and pitch. It's easy to dismiss that with a "but i just care for the campaign" but it had to be developed, tested, and polished just the same. From various dev comments over the years I conclude that preparig a consumer-ready editor is a major project in itself and I would not be surprised if up to a third of their man-hours went into that part of the project.

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Even from that standpoint things are not so bright since editor has some limitations like that gear can't be edited so very poor itemization can't be fixed(there are more limitations that I read about but I can't remember atm).Editors is also lot less user friendly than NWN editor.

Nameless one said:

Even from that standpoint things are not so bright since editor has some limitations like that gear can't be edited so very poor itemization can't be fixed(there are more limitations that I read about but I can't remember atm).Editors is also lot less user friendly than NWN editor.

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I'm such a glass half full guy, I know
I'll wait to see what people CAN do with it, before I worry what they can't do with it. Also my experience with TES modding is that limitations mostly don't stand long in the face of dedicated modders. And who knows, maybe HB will update the editor, if the game and user content proves to be popular enough.
By the way - I don't personally expect I will play more than a few modules, I have my backlog to work on and plenty of other games to look forward to. I'l probably wait two years and then play the top two or three user modules, and I am quite optimistic I won't be dissapointed with that.

GhanBuriGhan said:

And well 15 months really is not much. Don't forget that Grimrock had a long prior history with slow and partial development, before they set down to work on it in earnest. Conquistadors kickstarted to get money to polish their already mostly developed game.

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Yes - maybe the best projects on Kickstarter are going to be ones where the developers have already made some progress on a game they want to make such as D:OS. InExile & Obsidian would perhaps be an exception to that, not least because Brian Fargo appears to be quite innovative in making use of resources - W.A.S.T.E, overlapping projects etc. I'll certainly be a bit more wary of green field projects in the future. Probably Double Fine's Massive Chalice will turn out as a bit of a budget effort too.

GhanBuriGhan said:

But FFS - isn't KS about giving new teams a chance? Now they have a platform to work from, money to fund further projects, gained experience… I'm personally looking forward to what is to follow.

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This -> IMHO the original Kickstarter idea is to fund new interesting teams that don't get money elsewhere.

It is a gamble in itself to crowdfund a game, you'll never know what comes out in the end.
It is NOT some kind of preorder with a guaranteed quality.

GhanBuriGhan said:

I'm such a glass half full guy, I know
I'll wait to see what people CAN do with it, before I worry what they can't do with it. Also my experience with TES modding is that limitations mostly don't stand long in the face of dedicated modders. And who knows, maybe HB will update the editor, if the game and user content proves to be popular enough.

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I am sure there will be quality user content if editor becomes popular but not my point.My point is that they didn't do particularly good job even there so I don't think it redeems them for short mediocre game.

HiddenX said:

This -> IMHO the original Kickstarter idea is to fund new interesting teams that don't get money elsewhere.

It is a gamble in itself to crowdfund a game, you'll never know what comes out in the end.
It is NOT some kind of preorder with a guaranteed quality.

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No, but it's not intended to be a toilet for flushing your money down either .

From the comments here it seems like you were expecting Baldur's Gate from this. I really enjoyed what i played from this. Not every game has to have looting etc. It is one of the reasons why i enjoyed it. It felt like a breath of fresh air to me because of the lack of norms in the game. However the save thing was stupid.

Roq said:

No, but it's not intended to be a toilet for flushing your money down either .

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That's not how I feel about SRR, or KS in general, and it seems very early to come up with such a verdict - but if that's how you feel, then by all means, be very careful with the kinds of games you fund on KS - because predicting the ouctome is and will remain very hard. It's like the stock exchange: I'd recommend to anyone not to throw money at KS they would rather use to buy a game (or god forbid need for anything else)- Use your "extra" money for that.

GhanBuriGhan said:

That's not how I feel about SRR, or KS in general, and it seems very early to come up with such a verdict - but if that's how you feel, then by all means, be very careful with the kinds of games you fund on KS - because predicting the ouctome is and will remain very hard. It's like the stock exchange: I'd recommend to anyone not to throw money at KS they would rather use to buy a game (or god forbid need for anything else)- Use your "extra" money for that.

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No it's not what I feel - that's why I said Kickstarter is *not* a toilet. I've funded quite a lot of projects on Kickstarter (over 30) and my main interest is to encourage innovation and projects with deeper strategic gameplay that don't necessarily appeal to the mass market, at least not yet. I'm not going to have sleepless nights if some of those projects don't live up to expectations or even fail entirely. From SRR's point of view, it's a reasonable budget/mobile game and I don't particularly regret backing it, but it's not the kind of thing I can get too excited about, unless HBS were to take the gameplay to a different level.

I have been playing the game and enjoying it so far. Yes, it's linear, not much room to exploring, etc. But writing is really good, combat is decent, setting is uncommon. I feel like playing a lite version of Planescape Torment. While playing it I realized how I became tired of action combat and cutscenes in modern RPGs. I'm taking it slow. Reading all dialogues carefully and calculating my moves in combat.