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The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal
jfruh writes "In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an 'early release' version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed."
Surely you mean "The Dangers of Overextending the Scope of Your Project Beyond What Resource Allocations Allows".
I guess that's not scary enough though.
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Project costs way more than expected. News at 11.
Only buy a finished product unless you have money to burn.
'It's a bad plan that can't be changed' – Publilius Syrus c.100 BC
Release the core game as it was intended on time and add the extras (in game, ports to other platforms, whatever...) later.
This needs to be planned for Kickstarters from, well, before the start. Because you might get more money than anticipated, but not more time.
Like not taking into account the Crowdfunding site share, Paypal transfer tax (depending on where you live and what site you did use), country, state and city taxes. If you are opening a business there are costs for that too. To properly employ someone is very expensive in some countries (guess what: taxes, social security and so on).
People will eventually learn how to calculate all this, but indies went too eager to the crowndfunding bubble and did not consult their accountants to see how much game development actually costs. Ow yes... accountants also cost money.
You could say that Tim was victim of his own success, but I say he was victim to his own creativity combined with over-excitement.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Actually, there is a problem with goals here-- specifically, that there wasn't one set in the first place. The Doublefine Kickstarter was an experiment that asked for money to finance the creation of a game, and a documentary film of the whole thing. Nobody knew what it was at first, certainly nobody expected it to get out of hand, and then Tim decided to make something Totally Amazingly New and proceeded to torpedo the budget.
What he has now is a fantastic idea, but it's the kind of fantastic idea that wants a whole lot more money than the KS brought in, because it's going to require a lot of artists working their hands down to the wrists.
Which is why you should stick to well defined objectives. Do the planned release. If you got more money than you expected then you release an expansion pack later for free.
in "The Producers".
The original project maybe not. The stretch goals probably.
With stretch goals you either need more time or more staff than you had originally planned on. If your stretch goal is 10% more than your base game and involves some trivial art feature that's easy to just hire an artist or overtime and existing one for.
When you get 8x as much money as you were planning on, you stick in goals that you don't think you'll meet, or don't have serious cost estimations for. And that's where you get into trouble. People aren't serious about getting down to work when they know there is way more money than you expected available to pay them, hiring on significantly more staff than you were expecting, with the required office space and infrastructure and training that goes with that takes time, a lot of it, and then with the way kickstarter funding is counted by tax agencies you may be screwed on any money you didn't spend that calendar year and be looking at a huge tax bill. Etc.
Oh, and as with all creative enterprises, just because I made a great movie/game/story last time doesn't mean I will do so next time, or maybe my great idea will turn out to be... not so great on implementation and now I have to do something else. Changing gears costs money too.
For another example look at the Pebble watch.
Originally wanted $100,000 in funding, wound up getting over $10 million. That changed the size of their problem from making 1000 watches, to making 100,000 watches. So now they had to scale their manufacturing by a factor of 100, which is a totally different set of problems to solve.
There has been a lot of angst (some anger) at the delivery delays, most of the "investors" have been reasonably patient, some have been downright ignorant. One of the most popular forum topics is something like "I funded it on [date], why haven't I got my watch", where [date] was only a small number of days after the kickstarter campaign began, but in reality was when they were at over $5 million going up.
Disclaimer: I'm still waiting (patiently) on my two watches. I should have just ordered black, or changed to black when they made the option available. sigh!
The key is to stick to your original stated goals, and not to expand them just because you get a bunch more money.
People knew what they were buying with the KS, so there was no reason to radically up-scope the mission, especially to the point that the mission became unobtainable.
When you've got a "creative type" in charge of managing a project, you get "creative project management".
Where I work, if a 6-month project ended up taking 3 years, people would be fired. Or overthrown. Or lynched by a mob.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
While developers like to hate on publishers, and often with good reason, one thing they usually do is have some business and accounting sense to keep projects on track. Developers can have a "just another couple months and it'll be great!" mentality whereas a publisher understands that time is money, a lot of it. Every month you spend on a project has a big cost. Hence it can be important to release earlier, even if it does mean cutting back.
Shadowbane and Duke Nukem Forever are two great examples of developers just running away with the "we'll just work on it until it is whatever our vision is," sort of thing and failing massively.
The problem with the Doublefine thing is that it seems to be a creative person at the helm, and that can mean bad business decisions. It's a nice sentiment to say "Let creativity run wild," but in the real world, you have to consider business concerns.
I'm more optimistic on Wasteland 2 because Brian Fargo is at the helm and he's a business person. He seems to well understand the need for getting things out the door and working on doing what you can with the resources you have, even if it is less than you want to do.
Todd Howard had some good points on this during his keynote about this kind of thing: "Your ideas are not as important as your execution," and "We can do anything, we just can't do everything." Both are very true. You have to decide what is going to be in and what isn't, because you haven't the time or resources to implement it all, and what you do implement needs to be good because the grandest ideas are blunted in an unplayable game.
Some of the games that have come on KS have had a pretty good business plan behind them. They know what they want to make, the basics of the world, the story, the scope, all that kind of thing. They then can determine based on funding what sorts of things they'll be able to put in the final project. I mean this goes on with any game project, you will have more ideas than you've ability to implement, so you decide what to keep and what to cut.
However the Doublefine Adventure really didn't seem to have that. It was basically "Let's make a point and click adventure game!" Ok, cool, but that is pretty broad. I mean they don't even have enough to have a title, just kinda a place holder. A whole lot could fall in their potential scope. Hence, a bit harder to know how to budget for it and so on.
They really would have been better off having a more solid plan first and then been able to do some budgeting on it.
Also, if you watched those Amnesia videos that Double Fine put out, you would see that Tim Schafer is working with a lot of other good people. Frankly it is impossible to build a large game through one person's vision and oversight, you need multiple people each chipping away at the project almost autonomously if you want some magnum opus full of creativity and surprises. Being enough of a good sort to have lots of good people that want to work with you is what separates successful game creators from the wrecks and failures strewn around the industry's forgotten corners.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I just don't understand why the scope was expanded at all.
If I need $X to do W, and then find myself with $X+Y, I spend $X to do W, then keep $Y for a later Z.
More specifically, he said "I want to make this game, and need $400,000". Once he got $3.3 million, he should have created and released the original game he had planned, and reserved the other $2.9 million for the next game.
What kind of fucking idiot decides to spend all the money he has simply because he has it?
Tim is smart enough to know that he cannot run. The Internet is everywhere. We will track him down, lock him up in a small room, Misery-style, and make him write the game we want. Along with the whole Broken Age team, of course. Can't expect Tim to do the programming and artwork, even if we hack off a foot or two.
Anyway, point being, Tim isn't going anywhere. I'm perfectly confident the game will be made, and it will be Schafer-awesome.
No, but I could see Tim and Ron singing "Bootay!" and throwing doubloons in the air.
Statement titled "A Note from Tim"
As a side note, it appears that a majority of the backers (or at least, those who identify themselves as backers online) are fine with expanding the scope of the game. And also, that those who complain the loudest against it do not appear to have put any money into the project (like parent poster).
The issue comes from backers believing they're preordering a product.
This is not what is going on here. What is going on is more akin to the Medieval practice of being a patron to an artist.
We hand our collective money to an artist who says "I want to make something like this... And the more you provide me in funding the bigger and more grand a statue I can make."
We as a group come together and pool our money and hand it to the artist saying "We like your vision. Here is a bucket of gold coins, go forth and create awesomeness".
This makes more sense when you consider that the high end rewards are usually something like "A copy of the widget, plus lunch with the widget visionary"
Noone pays 1000$ for a game. People pay 1000$ for artistic vision and being a part of seeing the vision realized.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Three million dollars isn't "a giant stack of money" for a game studio. Remember that John Carmack interview on games for mobile, where he said it's cool because you only need 30 million to create a great game instead of 300? AAA-games cost a shit load of cash to develop. Having a talented team working for over a year on something burns money like crazy.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.