Let's talk anout money. I am here to debunk three of the things that I see people say about Indivisible all the time.
Here is the first one : "1.5 million dollars is a lot of money."
I realise that asking for it all at once is not asking for it in bite-sized chunks but we couldn't make the whole game for bite-sized chunks, so we decided very specifically not to do that because we don't wanna do the thing where it's like "we raised $500,000, now we can make the first third", that sort of sucks. But anyway, people say that 1.5 million is a lot of money. I thought we went through this pretty well on Skullgirls but I guess we didn't, so I'm gonna do it again, and I have new examples that are not fighting games this time.
The federal poverty level (the federal government defining "You should make more than this or else we are going to put you on monetary aid") is $20,000 per year. If you look at the credits for Super Metroid (because Super Metroid is an awesome game and was made a long time ago) and you subtract all of the people that are obviously not part of the team like the Nintendo central developers and all that, you end up with 23 people. 23 people times $20,000 is $460,000. That is $460,000 to pay the team that made super metroid for one year. super metroid was in pre-production/approval phase for one year, and then in production for two years, all of which can be found on the wikipedia page. If you multiply $460,000 by three, you get $1,380,000. $1,380,000 to pay just the team that made Super metroid at poverty level for three years. That doesn't include an office, computers, internet, devkits, testing, localisation, marketing, etc… Let's increase that to not poverty level. Let's increase it to what a lot people in parts of the US think is a semi decent/semi crappy salary : $40,000 a year. That's really easy maths too, because we just add $1,380,000. If we're doubling that, we get 2.76 million. That's to pay the people that made Super Metroid at the level that would allow them to not be on foodstamps for a year. Still not including all the other expenses.
We know from making Skullgirls approximately how many people we would need to make Indivisible in the time frame that we're looking at and it is more than 23 people. We need a crapton of art contractors - I think that we had something like 70 on Skullgirls. We will need many more core staff, etc… Adding to that stuff and adding in office and internet and the actual expenses that we glossed over previously, we arived at a total cost of $3,500,000 to make the game, and that includes trying to do it in two years instead of three by staffing up extra. That's the real budget for the game. If you look at other games that are being made, they cost way more than that. Destiny cost $100,000,000 (transcriptor's note : it was actually 140 million) to make. 100 million, that's one of those numbers that you can't actually event imagine. We are not Destiny, we are not having to pay Microsoft, etc… But 3.5 million is the real number that it will take to make this game, it is not inflated or anything like that.
Now the second bit : "They already have a publisher, the game is gonna get made anyway."
This one is super easy : That isn't the case. After a lot of negociations, we were able to convince 505 to be nice and put in 2 million of the 3.5 that we need - which is slightly over half - and take care of a lot of the other development costs, like localisation and testing and marketing and stuff. Which means that the entire 3.5 can actually go towards game development, not extra expenses like backer rewards and things that we have it go towards on Skullgirls. They won't pay for the whole thing. We negociated with them to go to this. They are a publisher, they are not our publisher. They would also be our publisher if we started making the game but they are not acting in the traditional publishing role of funding the entire thing and making the entire profits. They are giving us a pretty dang good deal on the back end. They are giving us a decent back end that is much better that we would get from a traditional publisher if we can raise this money. They are not putting in money unless we can raise this money. They will not fund the whole thing if we fail. We do not already have a publisher.
The third thing that people say all the time is : "Well they already have a demo, obviously they are gonna make the game anyway", or "The prototype looks so done that they can obviously finish the game from here."
No. That prototype was the result of three months and about one week of super intense work by a very small team of people. That does not translate into an entire RPG. There are no cut scenes, there is no plot - we have a plot but there is no implementation of a plot. There is a level that is modelled at not the level that we would like to model the final game. There are four playable characters. We want to have way the hell more than four. Having a prototype does not mean that the game is getting made in any way. It means that instead of spending three months making campaign and trying to convince you that we can make something cool, we spent three months making something that we think is cool, that you can play and think is cool. We are trying to do this the most absolutely transparent way that we can, out of everything you have seen from a crowdfunding drive. Also, I would like to point out that our crowdfunding drive on indiegogo is not flexible funding. If we do not make the goal, none of it is kept. All of it is given back to the people who said that they would support us, and we would cry and disband the company. We try do to this as honestly and normally as we possibly can, and we are meeting exactly the same resistance as if we hadn't tried to do that, which is frustrating.
The reason that I am saying this is that I hope people are recording that that, I hope people will put this on youtube and I hope poeple will distribute it to everybody. We are attempting to run one of the more honest crowdfunding campaigns that has ever been run, we're showing you exactly what we're gonna make, we do not have funding in any way and I'm kind of annoyed that so many crowdfunding drives at this points have had like 90% of their funding from investors already and just use this as an interest gauge because that basically killed our ability to say "We don't have a publisher and this is not an interest gauge" because people look at it and they go "Bloodstained is $500,000, why are you guys 1.5 million ?". Bloodstained is 5 million dollars. It is not $500,000 dollars, they had 4.5 million of funding already.
Somebody from the stream chat mentionned "Another common question is : Why not Kickstarter ?"
Number 1 : Indiegogo is giving us a really good rate on this campaign, which means that we lose less money than we do from putting it on Kickstarter. Number 2 : Indiegogo was pretty awesome to us during Skullgirls and we think that they deserve to be repaid for their awesomeness. Number 3 : This is going to sound really weird, but Kickstarter doesn't take your money until the campaign is done. If you make the goal, you can pledge $20,000 and when the campaign is done is when they charge you. A lot of people don't like that because they are using the American credit card mentality of "I want to put money in that I don't actually have, so I'll pledge to this Kickstarter and assuming that I have it later, I will pay that. We as the campaigners like that Indiegogo takes your money right away, because we know that when the campaign succeeds we are going to actually get that money. If half the people that pledge for a Kickstarter campaign don't actually have that money when it succeeds, then that campaign only gets half that money even though it succeeds. We like that they take your money right aaway because it means that we know that the money is there. That's good for us because it means that we know that was is gonna happen is actually gonna happen.
Another reason we went through indiegogo that turns out to not having been true yet but might eventually is that Kickstarter only pays you when the campaign is over. If you can meet your goal early with Indiegogo - even if it's a fixed funding campaign - they will pay you pretty damn quickly. They did it on Skullgirls : We started working on Squigly with the money from Squigly after like three days. With Kickstarter, we would have had to wait the whole month. If we had started this campaign and blown it out of the water in the first 24 hours, we could have started working on the game right away.There are some things that Indiegogo has done that are less awesome than the things that Kickstarter has done but a lot of the stuff that they do on their platform make decent sense from the campaigner's perspective, so that's why. They fixed a lot of the problems that the Skullgirls campaign had, they made it a lot easier to upgrade your perks. They don't offer add-ons and all that stuff but from the campaigner's side, they do some things that turned out to be really nice. For example, if 10% of the people who pledge didn't actually have the money when the campaign succeeded, then we'd be 150 000$ less at the end.
That's the thing. If we don't make this, then we're not gonna make the game. We have given you as much as an honest budget as we could. I've seen a bunch of people talk about the fact that the pie chart on the crowdfund page is not divided up super amazingly like Skullgirls was, and I will tell you exactly why that is. Skullgirls had a bunch of seperate exepenses in it like backer rewards and testing and localisation and all that stuff. We don't have this in this pie chart because if the campaign makes it, 505 has agreed to pay for that stuff. They don't want us to say that on the crowdfunding page for legal reasons because I guess other companies have gotten in trouble for that kind of thing, which is a little bit weird, but yeah. The pie cart is divided up exactly the way that it will be divided up, which is : Indiegogo takes their fee, and we get the rest of it to actually make the game.
Someone said "Why are you even asking for a real salary ? You should be thankful that you get to work on the thing."
Let's say you got a job working at an amusement park and you really like working in an amusement park. And somebody came up to you and said : "Why are they paying you this much to work at an amusement park ? You should be making barely minimum wage, you don't deserve to have perks for what you're doing." Because you are doing a thing that makes you happy doesn't mean you deserve to make nothing. For the people who are curious, let's do some very quick maths. Skullgirls is $250,000 a character. A character was supposed to take about three months. If we multiply that, that is 1 million dollars a year to make Skullgirls. If we multiply that by 2 years, that's 2 million dollars. That was not enough for us to survive. I, personally, am down over $45k since starting to work on Skullgirls. That includes getting payed at Reverge and getting paid for the Indiegogo that we did. I am taking not only a pay cut but a loss to do most of this stuff. I can't afford to do that anymore. Additionally, I am a game developper/programmer with over 10 years of experience who worked on things liks Star Wars : Battlefront 2 and Skullgirls. I have been a lead, a senior, a design director. If you look and the game developer salary survey, the farthest category they have is with 6 years of experience. Last year, programmers with 6 years of experience were making on average $160,000 a year. That's average, which means half of it are making more than that. I'm losing money to work on Skullgirls, and I'm barely breaking even with what I've requested with Indivisible. We are making sacrifices to work on this project because this is the thing that we wanna do, because it is not funded by a giant company, and we don't have to listen to a board of directors telling us to make the sequel to something that we didn't like in the first place. We are taking pay cuts to do this kind of thing, so I really don't know what else to say to that.
We are asking for what is a realistic game development budget, we are not asking for a super huge amount and we still get crap for all of it. We have made a prototype specifically so that you don't have to take us on faith (protoype that, by the way, looks a lot nicer that a prototype actually has to). This prototype was us treating this time as if we were making a full game. I put in 90 hours a week on this prototype just like I did on Skullgirls. We want people to see that we are capable on doing the things that we said we were capable on doing so we did them. We don't have something like 6 producers on this project that aren't doing anything.
In case I didn't make the point, the prototype was not just available to backers, it's available to everybody. We want you to know what you're getting into before you back the campaign at all. You don't have to give us any money in order to play the prototype but if you do play the prototype and you like it, it would be nice if you would give us money because if you don't, there won't be any more. I kind of resent when people say "there is a prototype, the game is obviously getting made". What they're actually saying is "These people were willing to work for peanuts really really hard for a short period of time so they didn't have to lie to you and promise you things so obviously they are gonna finish it." I seriously resent that.
(Interlocutor speaking: Following up with their saying, you guys are also very open to the community, you're easy to get a hold and contact. render and Peter are always on Twitter, on Youtube answering comments, … You can't be anymore open)
Someone asks : "When the campaign is done, are you guys still gonna be holding development streams and all that stuff ?"
Yes we totally are. We could have gone to publishers with the prototype and said "Hey, you wanna fund this game ? We totally wanna make this game". If it was paid for by a larger company, two things would have happened. Number one : That larger company would be in charge of content and if they told us to make the main character a white male, then we would have to make the main character a white male, because that's what the people who are paying our salary would want. The second thing that would happen is non-open development. We wouldn't be able to stream things, show betas, answer community questions, etc … 505 has agreed ot put money behind this project if it succeeds and still let us do that stuff. To a company that is not used to working with crowdfunding, that is a huge deal. Having them agree to basically us being able to deide what we show and what we say, that is a huge deal. Companies are very protective of that kind of thing because that's really easy to tarnish your image with that kind of thing.
Will Lab Zero get enough from sales to keep yourself above water when this is done ?
The way Skullgirls worked was we didn't get any royalties at all until July of last year and it wasn't retroactive. We were okay with that because we never made a game before. We were okay with giving up the IP because we never made a game before and we really wanted a chance to do that thing. With Indivisible, part of it is : the deal gets better for us the more money we raise. If we blew that goal out of the water next week and then raised 3 million dollars, then we would have a much larger share of the IP and a much better back end. We have a deal that is appproximately more than three times as good as typical royalties agreements. which is kind of amazing for us as a smaller company. I'm pretty sure I'm not actually allowed to tell you the terms. If this was just us, we would totally tell you the terms right now but we are dealing with a larger company that need to make sure that we don't say anything that would get them into legal trouble or piss off their lawyers.
If we didn't have a company, we would have had to ask everybody for 3.5 million which is kind of insane. We are extremely happy to be working with 505 because the deal they have given us is really amazing.