4 ms·

It's not over yet. Anybody want to take a wild guess on what their funding will be after 30 days of quieter exposure?

by lhnz 15y ago

jakeonthemove 15y ago
I'd place my bet on a little over 2 million :-)...
- sirclueless 15y ago
  I think you are very much underselling them. They are offering an adventure game with advance beta access for 15 bucks, which is probably the same price it will sell for eventually. Add on the usual kickstarter upsells, and the fact that 16,000 people bought into it day one, and you are looking at at least 5 million IMO.
  - jakeonthemove 15y ago
    Yeah, it's a complete shot in the dark :-)...
jd 15y ago
I'm guessing that the "early spike" can't reach more than 20% of their total audience. So if they don't smash the Kickstarter record and reach 5 million I'll be amazed. Even 10 million is completely reasonable.
tomkinstinch 15y ago
What would a realistic cost be for a game like the one they are proposing? Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists, musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising, etc.
- mrcharles 15y ago
  Well, they said it would be a small team of 6-7 people, and their aim is to finish for October. With that math, we're looking at those devs being paid around 70k a year, give or take. Which is probably about right. I'm not sure how taxes affect the money raised from Kickstarter -- but I assume the plan from Double Fine was to get a bunch of the money from the internet, and then throw in a bit of their own. As for creating an adventure game, it's not a very large technical challenge, for the most part. 7-8 quality devs for 8 months? I can believe they could bust out an adventure game, at a low fidelity art style. The biggest costs to an adventure game would be asset creation. Drawing everything, or modelling everything. That's where the money will go primarily.
- dagw 15y ago
  $300,000 is before they sell anything. If the game was even just moderately successful they'd probably make that much again in sales. So the $300k number may have been the number they figured they'd need to get far enough to convince someone to advance them the rest of the money against future sales.
genbattle 15y ago
We can only see their kickstarter funding. They also have the higher-tier funding brackets they've been advertising on their site. My guess is they've probably had another $50,000-$200,000 put in at that upper bracket (one or two people are probably crazy/rich enough). It's interesting that crowdfunding could really be a sustainable model for game development going forward; Double fine basically have all their development costs paid up front, so any extra sales on steam or whatever will be pure profit. I don't think it's a model that would work for every game, but it could be an interesting direction for small-medium studios like double fine to pursue; say once every 6-18 months they come up with another game they want to put out there, see if they can get it crowd funded, then if it gets funded they can go ahead with it. They can still do their more mainstream XBLA games etc. as their bread and butter, and use these games to keep the studio busy in between more traditional games. The other interesting point is the "pay what you want" part of the model: people can put in $1 and just see how the game turns out, or they can put in $15 to get a copy of the game or release, or the really dedicated fans can pay more to get extra bonuses like lunch with Tim. This is a huge change from the traditional "one price for all" game pricing. It's also great that basically all of the money raised is going towards the game and the studio that made it.

It's not over yet. Anybody want to take a wild guess on what their funding will be after 30 days of quieter exposure?

by lhnz 15y ago

It's not over yet. Anybody want to take a wild guess on what their funding will be after 30 days of quieter exposure?

jakeonthemove 15y ago

I'd place my bet on a little over 2 million :-)...

sirclueless 15y ago
I think you are very much underselling them. They are offering an adventure game with advance beta access for 15 bucks, which is probably the same price it will sell for eventually. Add on the usual kickstarter upsells, and the fact that 16,000 people bought into it day one, and you are looking at at least 5 million IMO.
- jakeonthemove 15y ago
  Yeah, it's a complete shot in the dark :-)...

jd 15y ago

I'm guessing that the "early spike" can't reach more than 20% of their total audience. So if they don't smash the Kickstarter record and reach 5 million I'll be amazed. Even 10 million is completely reasonable.

tomkinstinch 15y ago

What would a realistic cost be for a game like the one they are proposing? Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists, musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising, etc.

mrcharles 15y ago
Well, they said it would be a small team of 6-7 people, and their aim is to finish for October. With that math, we're looking at those devs being paid around 70k a year, give or take. Which is probably about right. I'm not sure how taxes affect the money raised from Kickstarter -- but I assume the plan from Double Fine was to get a bunch of the money from the internet, and then throw in a bit of their own. As for creating an adventure game, it's not a very large technical challenge, for the most part. 7-8 quality devs for 8 months? I can believe they could bust out an adventure game, at a low fidelity art style. The biggest costs to an adventure game would be asset creation. Drawing everything, or modelling everything. That's where the money will go primarily.
dagw 15y ago
$300,000 is before they sell anything. If the game was even just moderately successful they'd probably make that much again in sales. So the $300k number may have been the number they figured they'd need to get far enough to convince someone to advance them the rest of the money against future sales.

genbattle 15y ago

We can only see their kickstarter funding. They also have the higher-tier funding brackets they've been advertising on their site. My guess is they've probably had another $50,000-$200,000 put in at that upper bracket (one or two people are probably crazy/rich enough). It's interesting that crowdfunding could really be a sustainable model for game development going forward; Double fine basically have all their development costs paid up front, so any extra sales on steam or whatever will be pure profit. I don't think it's a model that would work for every game, but it could be an interesting direction for small-medium studios like double fine to pursue; say once every 6-18 months they come up with another game they want to put out there, see if they can get it crowd funded, then if it gets funded they can go ahead with it. They can still do their more mainstream XBLA games etc. as their bread and butter, and use these games to keep the studio busy in between more traditional games. The other interesting point is the "pay what you want" part of the model: people can put in $1 and just see how the game turns out, or they can put in $15 to get a copy of the game or release, or the really dedicated fans can pay more to get extra bonuses like lunch with Tim. This is a huge change from the traditional "one price for all" game pricing. It's also great that basically all of the money raised is going towards the game and the studio that made it.