I think that was the first relatively big failure so far?
LOL, he should shop at Walmart.
I remember reading somewhere that about 50% of kick-starter game projects will end up like this (estimated guess by a respectable developer). It is part of the reason that kick-starter doesn’t want to be viewed as a store, because even though their success is from a ‘pre-order’ customer mentality they cannot guarantee it will get to that stage.
From what I see in the kickstarter, it was either 3 guys or 2 guys (2 if the third guy from their first failed kickstarter left the team.)
Burning 5.5k a month, for the salary of 3 developers, is actually rather conservative. It’s very tough to live on $1833 a month.
If it’s 2 guys, we still talking 2750 a month, that still is tough.
Their biggest mistake was not “handling of the staff”, but realistic expectations on production time and required pledge. A 25k pledge may have been OK if the goal was to develop everything solo, as a single man, living in a low cost of living state (Tennessee or Kentucky come to mind.) Even working solo, attempting to do this and live in California (I assume they are there since that’s where Cryptic, their former employer, is located.)
Let this be a lesson to everyone here: listen to others when they tell you it’s not realistic to finish the masterpiece game you are doing in a realistic amount of time! Not even with game dev experience is it an easy thing to come up with a realistic development estimate.
The sadness is that the choices they made even before development started were so asinine that it was almost guaranteed to fail. Seriously - developing a game in the GO language? Your developer quits, and what happens - you fail because no one else can pick up the pieces.
The smartest (I don’t care about it’s intended use) use of Kickstarter is not to fund the full development of a game, but to do that final push to get things out there. Work as far as you can, have a near complete product, and run the Kickstarter not to fund your game but instead to gather “publishing costs” fundings. A lot of us here are looking to self-publish, but most have no clue what that actually means. Self publishing does not mean you upload the game to the App Store. It means you are going to go to conventions to promote your game, you will contact the press, send press releases and pay for ad space where possible. That’s what publishing is about and it tends to cost money.
If you are lucky, the Kickstarter alone can work as a marketing tool.
Well, he said the programmer was making $36k a year, which is $3k a month. He also said he wasn’t taking a salary, and the “junior programmer” they hired on was taking $2k a month. So that leaves… umm… pretty much nothing.
This sounds like they just didn’t think through the math at all. He must have just grabbed a number from the air and hoped for the best.
Are taxes paid on funds raised via Kickstarter? I mean it’s argueably charity. How do you file out a tax form for your business saying you raised 50K for making promises but not products?
Those are still rather low salaries. The project was founded with way less than 36k so obviously he thought the project would be done within 5 or 6 months. THAT was his biggest error. The team may have had some experience in the industry, but it sounds to me they didn’t have management experience. Assuming you will do any project that quickly, without any management experience was indeed naive.
Technically, if there are any profits. He can tie up the money from Kickstarter as “income” but if his expenses are way higher than the income he is in the negative so he should be fine. He better have a good paper trail, though.
It began and ended with Double Fine
How do you get that it ended with Double Fine? For game projects, Project Eternity raised more money on Kickstarter than Double fine did.
I wonder if some of these projects post lower goals than they need to make themselves more attractive of a bet and hope that they are several hundred percent funded. For example you get more attention by being on the recently funded list.
I think they tend to focus too much on “How much do we think we can get?”, and not enough on “How much do we actually need?”
When the simple truth is, if you don’t think you can get as much, if not more than you need, then you shouldn’t be posting on Kickstarter. You’re sealing your doom before you even start.
Indeed, being a good manager or leader and being a good engineer or technician are worlds apart.
Which raises the obvious question; what exactly was it that Dakan did? He was the “Project Leader” with no project or personnel management experience?
I guess we know why he wasn’t taking a salary.
Its basically idea men - where they cant do the programming or the art but they can do the presentation and come up with the big ideas, they outsource the actual work to contractors and eventually you are going to run out of money. If the team is a programmer and artist then it will get done. I just wonder if alot more projects arent going to start failing soon because they “run out of money”.
Yeah, that was pretty much my first thought as well.
It’s sad to see this.
On another note… I hate large companies being like gigantic leeches when it comes to kickstarter, when they could easily make the money without a pledging system…
How? By counterfeiting it? Or do you mean by begging funds from a publisher, who then tells you that you have to ship in November, even if you’re not done? And then they cancel half the payments and lower your royalty rate because your Metacritic score is 84.9 instead of 85?
I have more faith in Obsidian getting their project done than most of the other smaller “companies” that I’ve backed.
I seen this article the other day and it was a great laugh. People like to point at failures but this project had very little hope to begin with due to the budget set for the product. I am still shocked by the amount of projects with very low budgets that get funded by Kickstarter… Like this company, they provide no information on how they plan to produce their product without the normal cost associated with developing a game. Anyone who supported the product just had no idea of the actual cost it takes to make a game, or was willing to risk the chance.
I still think it is fine if others want to donate to projects like this but I hate to see sites like Gamasutra try to spin it off as a major failure/hit to Kickstarter. If the Ouya, Castle Story, or any of the others that got a significant amount of funding fail… Then I would expect an article.
-Dane