I marked this blog under two categories for a reason. Firstly because this blog will contain “game” news and secondly because I wanted to talk about owning an indie studio more and what has been happening over the course of the last 6 months.
Firstly, Vortex Games Inc is still going strong. Of course by that I mean that I am not giving up on the company and never will. Even if VGI turns into a side project forever I will continue to make games just because that is what I love to do. I am hoping someone will see my passion and dedication and not just look at the bottom line in numbers and realize that success comes from passionate people. So far that hasn’t happened yet.
Over the last 6-8 months I’ve been in a search for a great, and mostly local, programmer. I had a programmer named Sam Green (yes, I am calling him out) who was working on a game for us, that was a mix between mafia wars and game dev story, who just up and vanished without word. I haven’t heard from him in probably 3 months despite my many attempts to contact him on multiple platforms. He has seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, and with him he took the source code of the game that I had already paid him over half the amount to make.
Now there are two main lessons I learned from this event. The first is to always get the source code for a game someone is working on for you during periodic updates, or use a source control type of system (sometimes these can cost money). The second is that I would rather wait 6 months to find a semi-local (within driving distance) programmer so that if they ever do flake on me I can personally drive to their place of residence and ask them face to face why. I have actually considered sending a friend who is 3 hours away from Sam to his door to find out if he is even still living at the address I found for him. I have yet to do so though because I’ve been too busy working on other projects and have pretty much put that project out of my mind.
With that said, I recently decided to try my hand at Kickstarter. I hopped onto the band wagon during the Double Fine days and not after them so there still wasn’t too many games on the list like there is now. The project I decided to put up on Kickstarter was Tribble Sports. I figured if I could get the cash to pay for a full-time programmer and animator that we could finish the game before Comic-Con. In the Kickstarter page I put up images and even a DEMO of the game itself that you could play in Windows. I’m not a very creative person when it comes to videos so our was pretty basic but straight to the point. It was average compared to a lot of the other videos out there, but definitely not production quality.
I put up a goal of $30,000 which 5% would be taken by Kickstarter, another 5% by Amazon and that would leave us with $27,000. To pay a programmer for full-time work for 2 and 1/2 to 3 months I figured would be $10,000. Another $3,000 would go to the art and another $1,500 to a composer. That would leave $13,500. What people don’t understand is that the rewards actually cost money (most of the time) and so I averaged if people donated $5 we would make $3. $1 ($0.50×2 or 5%x2) for Kickstarter and Amazon) and $1 for the game we would have to gift them when it came out. So if we made $30,000 that means 6,000 donated $5, which means that we really have only $18,000 to work with. So in a real sense if you look at the estimation ($10,000 + $3,000 + $1,500 = $14,500) that means we’d have $3,500 left over which would go to taxes.
My point to all of those numbers is that while I was asking for $30,000, it actually turns out to be barely 50% of that after everything. This is what a LOT of people don’t realize. This is an even better example: Double Fine got $3,336,371 from their Kickstarter with 87,142 people as backers. Their minimum dollar amount was $15 which got you the game when it came out. This means that straight off the bat they need to make more than $1,307,130 to turn a profit with their launch and need to sell more than 87,142 copies. With the 10% taken off they took home $3,002,734. So $3,002,734 to make a game. With a staff of 47 people at a low average of $40,000 a year salary that’s $1,880,000. That’s just employee costs, this doesn’t include building rent, utilities, taxes, etc. So at MOST Double Fine can afford to run its studio for 1 year. If Double Fine cannot make their adventure game in 1 year, which isn’t easy to do, then they will be spending their own money to continue. This is an important distinction to make, because every dollar they have to spend of their own money increases that $1,307,130 debt that they currently have.
What most people don’t realize and I think this is important for even Double Fine to realize, is that when they release their adventure game they are already in debt that $1,307,130 because they owe those 87,142 people a $15 game. After all of the backers have received their game the only profit Double Fine makes is sales from people who DIDN’T back their Kickstarter. The last part of that sentence is what is important. They need to sell copies of their game to people who did not already back their project. That’s a crazy concept to consider.
So here are the few lessons I learned from Kickstarter. If you are going to ask for more than $10,000 for a game then you better have some kind of name behind you because most of the bigger projects I’ve seen that are asking for more than $10,000 are failing.
Lesson two is that you need to have a good quality video with a couple different people from your company in it so that people can see who they are dealing with.
Third lesson is don’t expect anything. I thought for sure that people would come back a game that had a demo (where no other games did) and was great looking and had a fun concept when I was only asking for $30,000 instead of the hundreds of thousands that people were backing on the larger games, and we barely got $300.
The Fourth lesson is ironically, less is more! The more information that you give to people the less they seem interested in your game (crazy huh!?). Double Fine got $3.3 million dollars with a few screenshots and a great video of Tim Schafer (not that he isn’t a handsome guy, love you Tim!). Seriously though I have nothing against Double Fine or Tim and I wish them luck with their game and their future work. Back to the fourth lesson though. When people played our demo we got asked “Why do you need $30,000? The game seems almost done!”, where as I instantly smack them across the head and ask them how many games they have made in their lifetime. 99.9% of the time the answer is never. That doesn’t change their opinion though and thus I learned to never give people more than I want them to think!
So here is the low down of what I will do if I ever decide to make another Kickstarter project. Firstly I would find someone who is popular in the game industry and get their name behind the game (this almost always means a success), secondly I won’t give people TOO much information. Finally, I will get a video made in a more professional way because this seems to be very important in the success of a Kickstarter.
Honestly, Kickstarter is a great place to go if you are a huge studio that has had successes in the past OR if you are a group of students who can build a game for $5,000. If you are an indie studio with no name and no reputation then Kickstarter will most likely not work for you.
That is all I am going to say about Kickstarter. Now onto the projects that we are working on. I have made a few tweets here and there and talked to a few different people about a Project X that we are working on. To give a little more information but not a lot, Project X is a word game that I believe can be as successful if not more than Words With Friends. It has a catchy name (reserved domains and app name), we are getting a live action (and hilarious) trailer made for it, the concept is fun AND secretly educational, and the game concept itself can be applied to multiple game types so it is very versatile. Sorry, that’s all the information you get at this time!
As for the development, we are about to enter internal testing. This test will be testing the basic functionality and fun factor of the game. If the game isn’t fun at it’s core then we have an issue, but I think it will be. After a few weeks of testing and more development we will start opening up the testing to people on the outside of VGI. Mainly close friends and stuff, but there will be a few testers from Disoriented asked back to test Project X.
In some other great news we have been speaking with Whitaker Trebella (@wtrebella on twitter). He did the music for Tilt to Live, Super Stickman Golf, Velocispider, Casey Contraption, Lunar Racer and more. He recently developed his own game (learning to program on his own time!) called Polymer (http://www.polymerapp.com). It’s a great puzzle game, check it out. We have been talking about doing a game together and tossing ideas back and forth so we’ll see what comes out of it! Even if nothing comes from it, he’s a great guy and it’s been fun just meeting him.
So that’s what is happening with VGI, and now you are in the loop. I’ll try to update this blog more now that more is happening!
~Richard (aka Geograd)
P.S. I forgot to add that I did finally find a great and semi-local programmer so that’s why things are progressing so well!
