Kickstarter for a new Tim Schafer adventure game project

[Construed]

Yea, I'm just saying, If you gave me 400k I would spend 10 hours a day for the rest of my life developing entire series of games, throw me 3.4 mill and ill do backflips and build you a fkn rocket that will get you to the moon.
This is what all who have donated get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L6R86SXL1pI

[Eric]

Have you played Grim Fandango? Full Throttle? Psychonauts? Costume Quest? Are you judging based on the graphics alone? Because the reason we're nostalgic for Grim Fandango isn't the graphics. It's because it was one of the best written, engaging, immersive stories ever told in adventure game form.

And the graphics, though they might not be up to the snuff of modern games, worked well for the story being told. The world created through them was consistently rich and imaginative. Plus, there's the voice acting, which on GF was superb.

This isn't meant in offense to you, because the same would be true of myself, but even working ten hours a day for the rest of your life, you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything near as good as Grim Fandango. If all you're focused on is how detailed the graphics are, you're kind of missing the point.

[Construed]

Yea, I heard the story was great and unique like no other, Never played it and certainly didn't mean any offense to the fans of it. Think back on my comments they are pretty rude and snide
so I'm sorry for that.
I've just lived a life of extreme poverty and it hurts me to see so much money thrown at something when I've never been able to get paid for any of my creative works.
I guess you could say I'm jealous that the man is going to be set for the rest of his life for doing the same thing I've been doing for 15 years and never received a penny, I guess in all reality i need to just get over it and start my own kickstarter.

[Armageddon]

What makes you say he'll be set for life? You do know all this money is going to pay his employees and probably hire new people, get new tools and such. I'm sure he doesn't much quite as much as you're assuming. Anyways Tim Shafer has climbed up the ladder and become a respected developer in the games industry, so what's wrong if he did make a lot of money? If you want to get paid for your creative work either sell your work or become employed by a game company, I make games for free because I like making games and I want people to see what I make, I don't want to swim in money. It just sounds like you're whining really.

Also I wish I could have donated. But I don't have a credit card. :'(

[veryweirdguy]

From Wikipedia:

An average development budget for a multiplatform game is US$18-28M, with high-profile games often exceeding more than $40M

Source

As far as I can tell, this does not include things like marketing and distribution, but I can't say for sure. Normally this would be covered, at least in part, by the publisher, but hopefully this model bypasses the need for a publisher, instead getting the product from developer to consumer directly.

Granted, this isn't a thoroughly comprehensive and researched post, but I would hope it shows how "some fatass getting paid 3.4 million dollars to sit on his ass" is a silly comment to make.

ANOTHER POINT: Initially the $400k was to be split thusly: $300k on the game and $100k on the documentary - I wonder if the split is being kept the same or not? Very interested in seeing the documentary.

[Eric]

Yea, I heard the story was great and unique like no other, Never played it and certainly didn't mean any offense to the fans of it.

I'm not offended at all, just I probably wouldn't be here if I hadn't played Grim Fandango, you know?

As has been posted, the three million seems like quite a bit until you actually start working out the budget. It's not a matter of Schafer being rich for the rest of his life, it's a matter of him being able to keep his company afloat for a year without soliciting work from one of the bigger publishers. The budget for the company's previous biggest hit, Psychonauts, was $13 million, so the Kickstarter is still well short of that, and that was released in 2005. Costume Quest from two years ago cost two million, and it's scope is smaller than what I foresee coming from this adventure game. In other words, I doubt anyone's salary will even increase that much, if at all.

[Snarky]

ANOTHER POINT: Initially the $400k was to be split thusly: $300k on the game and $100k on the documentary - I wonder if the split is being kept the same or not? Very interested in seeing the documentary.

Tim said somewhere (maybe the reddit Ask Me Anything) that they'd increase the documentary budget a bit, but that most of the additional money would go to the game.

Even granting that this is not a huge game budget by modern AAA standards, in effect the game budget is going to be more than ten times what the initial target was! I hope they can make something cool with all those additional resources.

One worry could be that the game has already tapped most of its potential market: There might not be a lot of additional sales above and beyond the people who've already paid, so if they spend all of the money on the game there might not be any profits. (Of course, it's not uncommon for development studios to get no profits from the games they develop, but they might at least want to have a chance to do so.) I guess they could bank some of the Kickstarter cash as in-advance profits, though I don't think most backers would approve.

[Stupot]

I should imagine a large portion of the Kickstarter money is probably going to go back into printing and shipping all the thousands of posters, t-shirts and what-not.  That is going to prove quite costly, and I can't see that being paid for by anything other than the KS money.

But Grim... assuming you're not deliberatly trolling... people have pledged money to this project because they trust Schafer, Ron and DF to come up with a quality adventure game.  It's not like the whole fund is going straight into his back pocket (despite these incriminating photos).

[Snarky]

They only ship you physical stuff at the $100 reward tier (and above), and I imagine that when you print t-shirts, posters, DVDs and game boxes in runs of 12'500, you can get a pretty good deal. Assuming that they can sort out the infrastructure to actually handle that many shipments without too much trouble (outsourcing, I'd guess?), I would highly doubt that the total cost would come to more than $10 or maybe 15 per unit. The hardcover book would obviously cost more, but that's at the $500 level and only runs to about 250 copies.

So yes, it's going to cost them some, but it's not going to be a "large portion" of the money. Maybe $5 out of every 100 raised.

[Khris]

GrimReapYou:
Maybe I'm being Captain Obvious here but Tim Schafer didn't get a lot of money because he financed his project using kickstarter, he got a lot of money because he financed his project using kickstarter after having built a great reputation as a designer and developer of several great games for over a decade.
See the difference?

[Construed]

Yea, It's true, I guess i just over-reacted a bit..

[Stupot]

I wasn't contradicting you Snarky, I was actually just trying to add to yours and VWG's posts by mentioning the fact that some of the unexpectedly large amount of money will have to be used to cover the unexpectedly large number of rewards as well as just the game and documentary (as opposed to being used to line Tim's pockets).

[Eggie]

So Wasteland 2, eh guys?

This is it now, this is the new games industry! I like it better than the old one already!

[Victor6]

So Wasteland 2, eh guys?

Do we have any assurance that it won't be another generic brown fps with some shallow rpg elements tacked on?

[Eggie]

Yes.

[Armageddon]

I'm fairly sure it's going to be top down like the original.

[Andail]

Yea, I'm just saying, If you gave me 400k I would spend 10 hours a day for the rest of my life developing entire series of games, throw me 3.4 mill and ill do backflips and build you a fkn rocket that will get you to the moon.
This is what all who have donated get:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L6R86SXL1pI

Are you saying that you'd make better use of that money than Tim Schafer?

I don't see the point of your post, really.

[Ali]

He's saying he's prepared to work for (by my calculations) $1.5 per hour. That's a pretty competitive rate!

In GrimReapYou's defence, he has admitted over-reacting and said sorry. And he brought the Willy Wonka rap to my attention.

On Topic: Tim Shafer's so cool.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I do have to argue that 3.4 million is actually a gigantic budget for a game like this. Assuming they work on the game for 2 years with full time employees. Even at an above average salary per year of $100k per employee (subtracting $200k for the documentary and $200k for voice actors), that could easily employ 15 people for two years.

This of course doesn't include advertising or anything of the sort, but this game was already talked about quite a bit before it was ever even started. I'm sure it will get quite a few heads turned the moment it finally gets released.

[Babar]

Two years? Didn't they say they want to release for October?