LMN8R
2747
It’s just another manifestation of gamer entitlement. Some people see a couple of indie games successfully developed by a couple people who struggled to pay the bills, eating only ramen for 3 years, and they assume that every developer should have to go through the same thing. God forbid some Kickstarter funds go to paying a decent living wage.
But yes, any reasonable person understands that, by paying a decent living wage, the developers don’t have to be constantly burdened by financial difficulties, which means they can put more focus on the project itself, which usually means a higher-quality project in the end.
Don’t want to pay someone’s salary? Don’t contribute to the Kickstarter. It’s really not complicated. But it’s also no different from buying a normal finished game off store shelves - when you hear about game budgets in the tens of millions, what exactly do they think those tens of millions are going to? It’s not like a movie where you might have expensive physical sets. The vast majority of a game development budget is simply paying the salaries of the people working on it.
Agreed. I think the problems happen when would-be game designers use the same logic for their Kickstarter projects.
Well, I like how the article explains so transparently how the people who said that $150K for a single character in a 2d brawler is bullshit are in fact right.
Let’s see their own explanation!
$48,000: Staff Salaries - 8 people for 10 weeks
$30,000: Animation and Clean-up Contracting
$4,000: Voice recording
$2,000: Hit-box Contracting
$5,000: Audio Implementation Contracting
$20,000: QA Testing
$10,000: 1st Party Certification
$10,500: IndieGoGo and Payment Processing Fees
$20,500: Manufacturing and Shipping Physical Rewards
Do you see it? They aren’t going to make the character! They make a campaign asking for $150K for the character, with part of that money they are going to outsource most of the work (in bold, animation, voice, audio, testing, even coding the hitbox!) while the team, 8 people for 10 weeks is being paid… for nothing. Well, not for nothing, for profit, of course. Let’s remember it’s a single character of their own game, can’t they test it themselves? Do they need to pay a QA team? It’s not testing a game, but a single character, surely they could have done it between eight people. Don’t they have in that staff that is being paid for 10 weeks an audio guy, nor a coder?
It reminds me a lot when a company gets a public contract for amount X, say $10 million, then subcontract a another company to make the work for $7 million, baam, pure profit. Hell, I have practical experience in the field…
But, apart from this singular case, I agree that people underestimate the cost of making a full game.
Reading a bit at the general idea of the game and looking at some videos, I think they should have asked at least $250-$300K*, not $100K. And that would have made a not-so-ambitious indie game, without great expansive features.
*Or maybe $350K, NYC is surely way expensive.
You never, ever want to rely on testing only internally with the dev team. Even if they were trained in QA, which is a skill, they do not have an outsider’s perspective nor are they likely to be a really broad test base.
LMN8R
2752
Every responsible developer outsources certain things that they have less expertise in. In such a situation, it’s far cheaper to outsource it to a company that specializes in that field than it is to try to do it in-house.
I really don’t think you understand how software development works in this example.
How do you think the design of the character comes about? Do you think that’s like, free, or something? Or are you being deliberately obtuse about the core team doing “nothing”?
Designing the actual character for the fighting game - how it works, what abilities it has, how it balances against everything else - is an extremely difficult and time-consuming job. And it’s what they’re good at, their expertise. It would be thoroughly irresponsible to waste peoples’ time doing those other things that can easily be contracted out when a contractor can do it much easier, and you don’t have the opportunity cost on the core team.
Of course, ideally you want an external Q&A. But in a small indie game, usually you don’t have that luxury, and use 3-4 family/friends, and maybe a pair of part-time Q&A jobs.
And this isn’t testing for a game, but for an extra character of an already built game.
I don’t think people expect the same Q&A level here than for example, Capcom next Street Fighter.
I do. I think people make those comparisons quite directly, even if it’s not fair. And hey, maybe they could have gotten away without hiring professional QA if they had to, but they didn’t have to - they budgeted it into what they were asking for on Kickstarter. And I strongly suspect the end result was the better for it.
LMN8R
2755
Yes, small indie teams don’t usually don’t have that luxury. But they wanted it to ensure the highest quality, and asked for the money to get it transparently. And they got the money.
What, exactly, is the problem here?
Are you suggesting that adding a character to a fighting game is trivial or something? That it can’t introduce a massive number of unexpected bugs that could only be caught by a competent QA team?
Of course it’s better outsource things that you don’t have the expertise. But the core team should have expertise… on something. It seems they don’t have expertise on animations, audio, hitboxes, etc etc
I’m a professional software developer, 7 years of experience.
Obviously someone on the core team did the concept of the character, the design of the abilities, an artist did the concept art and surely the keyframes of the animations, I was exaggerating with the “nothing”. It was just funny how they went on with “see? this is why it cost this much money! we aren’t swindling anyone” and while it’s true, the budget is inflated because they aren’t being very efficient with it, outsourcing 80% of the work involved.
The goal with Skullgirls was to create a new fighter title that would be used in competitions like EVO. Balance and bug Q&A have to be very tight.
Speaking of kickstarter with low goal? Sounds ambitious and seems pretty…
$320K for 14 devs. I suppose it depends if they have something advanced already.
Pod
2759
320k over 14 people is 22,857 each, which has to last until oct 2015, assuming they’ve got that date right.
Another problem is the matter of the final game’s release date. We would love to have it out by the end of 2015, but that may be delayed with the inclusion of new features such as Multiplayer, or other community-suggested features. That is why we are releasing the game in stages, beginning with the Alpha phase, moving into Early Beta, and eventually hitting final Beta where the last touches will be made before release. From then on, we will begin working on additional free content and any patches if they are needed.
I assume they must have a lot of other money in this and are just using kickstarter as a pre-order?
LMN8R
2760
Where is your evidence that the “budget is inflated” because they’re outsourcing things? The time needs to be spent somewhere, and that time would either be spent by the core team (sacrificing their time better spent on character design and balance) or by outsourcing (which means that the only significant cost is money).
It’s far more efficient to outsource things and free up the core team because you can parallelize a lot of the work, and it’s probably cheaper too. Asking a contractor to do a very specific task for a very specific outcome is a lot more straightforward than asking a core team member to “hey, stop designing that character. Go do this thing for a couple days. Oh, you’re done with that? Now go do that thing for a few weeks. Done? Ok, switch context again and go do that other thing for a few days”.
I don’t know very much about the cost of game development other than it’s expensive because skilled workers are expensive. When I see a Kickstarter from people who don’t have a lot of bonafides in the form of past game projects I wonder if they know how to budget? When Julian Gollop says he needs X in funding to finalize a game and release it in a few months, I feel good about sending $20 his way. He’s a veteran. When I see others who don’t have any games under their belt and they want to make a game with all these fabulous features and art and only need $100K I am extremely dubious.
I expect that most of the KS money goes towards paying people when it comes to computer games. That’s the most expensive part of the actual game development, isn’t it? PCs, software tools, and office space cost but there’s this feel about a lot of the KS projects that they are garage development projects where that stuff is the cheap stuff.
Anyway, I don’t back games that look like they are likely fails. I’m all for encouraging people to follow dreams, but I like to support the ones that seem to know what they are doing. I’ve already supported a few non-game Kickstarters that seem to be run by dingbats. Fortunately it’s like investing in penny stocks. My exposure is low.
While others have already addressed much of this better than I can (including actual fighting game developers in the original linked article itself), let’s still touch on the other specifics of why TurinTur is wrong and picked some rather poor examples:
Animation/clean-up contracting: This is standard for professional 2D animation. Keyframes are done internally at Lab Zero (and those animators do animation livestreams all the time, in case you don’t believe me), while tween frames and clean-up are outsourced. If only two people were working on all of this instead of outsourcing the grunt work, it would take months just to get the animation done, and even more months to work on clean-up. For one character.
(As a side note, during the early playable stages of a new Skullgirls character in the PC version’s beta client, we get rough frames for attack animations until the cleaned-up versions are ready, and believe me, there’s a huge difference.)
Voice recording: What, do you seriously expect an eight-man dev team to include professional VAs? Even if they did, do you then expect them to record dozens of unique lines (per character) in addition to their normal job?
Hitbox contracting: This goes with the animation. If you have 1500 frames and every single one needs unique hitboxes, that’s an unrealistic amount of work for one person; it makes more sense to have that done externally by a team, then have the lead gameplay dev go back and tweak things as necessary.
Audio implementation contracting: Same thing; going through and timing sound effects and voice clips to specific animations is not a one-man job, especially when that one man is busy working on the actual gameplay part of the game.
Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and FTL (among others), have we had ‘Universe Edge’ yet?
Tony_M
2764
My most common reaction to Kickstarters is that they set the budget too low, not too high. I’ve got no idea how these Kickstarters planned to make their games if they’d received just $1 over their original goal:
Wasteland 2 900k
Shadowrun Returns 400k
Grim Dawn 280k
Project Eternity 1100k
these are in pounds:
Divinity: Original Sin 400k
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 300k
I work in software development (corporate not games industry) and I would be terrified of planning any of those games on those budgets.
Well, Divinity: Original Sin was already in development and pretty far along, iirc. They were asking for money to make it shinier, not make it at all. Grim Dawn was also looking for a cash infusion more than the entire game budget (people had been preordering that thing for years.)
I believe on Grim Dawn, with the exception of a couple people, everyone on the team has day jobs.
