any ongoing or future plans?
Nope!
Yes I was severely lured to submitting my projectās application to Unreal Mega Grant and then realize that how it will be painful to make similar status of my game is now on at Unity. Even if succeed to get Mega Grant, hire few Unreal devs, money will vaporized fastly before finishing the final productā¦
You should focus on making something you can use to convince people youāre worth funding rather than trying to get a sum of money first like you always do.
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Well isnāt that a catch 22 as you will still have to present a great game idea/prototype/pitch and show the funders that you have the skills to actually deliver the product.
Or you want funding to make a game when you have not managed to make a great game due to low funds?
And if you could make great games with minimum funding then you probably wonāt need the funding as you will be making money from your great games, right?
PS: Pitching and Business Planning are different skill sets from Game Design/Development.
OP:
I think if your game was worth investing in, investors would have swarmed over you by now. In the event they donāt know about it and you need cash why not go for devolver digital or matching boutique publisher if you need money for it.
Just make a cool prototype. Is is mad fun to play? there is your gold.
Every time some person tells me āI need moneyyyy to prove itā¦ā er no, you donāt. You need solid prototype, you need to love what you do. Thatās all.
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Thereās nothing wrong with getting a grant if one is available, but I donāt think itās worth going out of oneās way to get it. Itās a crutch, and itās the sort of thing that can easily do more harm than good in the long run. At a minimum, itās bad if a grant is the only form of investment that one can attract to a game.
As much as I think kickstarter and early access are abused, at least they involve investment that is directly related to someoneās ability to pitch the game right at the target audience. Whereas grants are not always based on a clear conception of merit, at least from the point of view of players.
I also donāt really believe in the idea of throwing money at a saturated market. Making tools better improves things for everyone, but random money does not.
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I am considerably more interested in what people managed to achieve without money. Thisā¦ this is the real data, donāt you think?
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The thing is any market can be saturated with products then along comes a genre re-defining product/technology and everything changes e.g. Tetris, Wolfenstein 3D, Minecraft, PUBG/Fortnite to name a few.
So maybe a saturated market is ideal for new ground breaking games?
Also I think challenges are a great way to shake things up with new teams and ideas competing for prizes.
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When I setup and design new weapon ideas I shoot them at a wall for 5 minutes. If Iām not having fun after 5 minutes, itās not a fun weapon.
If I had spent money on art and assets for that weapon, Iād be wasting it. Fun prototypes are the fundamental core of the game and you can pitch them to publishers who will see easily if something is good or not. A Vertical Slice is different, and is directed at investors/public media.
Nothing wrong with getting free money, but you donāt need it in order to build a good prototype that is fun.
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What are you talking about? What? No. Most of your examples arenāt even from a point when there was market saturation.
Have you looked at magic leap grants.
No one will give any grant, without solid prove of concept.
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Magic Leap would have been far better off in my opinion just giving away headsets to any developer with an approved concept rather than handing a large lump sum and devices to a handful of people. I have to imagine there are enough people excited about AR that the large sum wouldnāt be necessary for them to make a product.
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Thatās why a challenge or competition could be better than a grant/funding driven system.
Could be but what benefit is there for Unity? Unityās the default option for people entering industry. Perhaps Unity could spend that super prize money on you know hiring more docs staff and really helping us produce content so much better, for all of us.
I want Unity investing in docs so we can all move towards dots and high performance but not leave people behind who might feel that itās a mental barrier to entry or maybe they feel sidelined?
Unity should spend those millions not on making one little indie fat, but making sure that we all, together learn how to make games in a professional way.
With dots visual scripting on the way, I want to bring people who feel sidelined or left out WITH ME toward AAA performance. So I want Unity to invest heavily in training even beginners in how to use dots, and how to properly make games in Unity. You can probably tell Iāve always wanted people to come with me toward the higher perf, the clearer workflow, the better practises, I listen to Unity staff carefully, try to forward good practises but really Unity needs to be investing in this more.
I donāt need to tell you how much that benefits not only Unity, but everyone with and around us in this industry. Donāt treat new people like theyāre dumb products chewing cud. Teach them properly. Costs money. About what Epic is fattening devs with right now.
Donāt care about dev budgets. Unity should be doing the harder job of removing dumb content involving co-routines and replacing it with AAA quality practises that can be applied to the everyday developer including people just starting to code.
I like how Unity started the whole democratization thing off. Thereās been a pause but now to go further you donāt make the individual dev fat, you make everyone have a strong education to do that themselves.
Teach a person to fish, but with the right dotted net.
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Do you really think throwing money at devs will create āground breaking gamesā? Prototyping a new idea like battle royale is not an incredibly expensive thing to do.
The problem with grants is that they hide the fact that a good game can and will stand on its own two legs, as long as everyone is doing their job. Grants might be good for things like space companies, certainly not games which represent the most easily accessible market in existence.
Sure, but competing for prizes is not the same as getting a grant.
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Normally VC (Venture Capitalists) does not even meet game idea pitches or even prototype showcases. They just donāt have interest because they canāt judge this will return their invested money at actual market or not.
So I heard that now they just want already released and proven game. Then why that proven hit game need more investment? Well they maybe donāt. But some of them can want more. In this case, there is cross of demands of both parts. VC and game dev.
Or dev team should be sure with strong past success records or backgrounds.
All indie devs not achieved in that status, from point of VCās view, no thanks at all.
So grant is huge for indie devsā¦
Grants are NOT huge for indie devs. Thereās like 1 grant for every 5000 devs. They are tiny for indie devs. Stop whining and make games.
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Plus the grants themselves are not significant. Just as an example the link below mentions that $500,000 were handed out to developers making UE4 projects, but that was spread across more than a dozen projects (the actual list on the page totals 17 projects, but there are more yet that were unannounced).
If we divide $500,000 evenly across 17 projects thatās just under $30,000 per project. By contrast a developer might cost as much as $100,000 (since youāre paying for office space, equipment, etc in addition to the salary). A grant of only that much wonāt make a successful project out of a failure. Youāll just fail a little slower than you were.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-games-awards-500-000-in-unreal-dev-grants