Larian's Unfair Advantage
credistick.com
credistick.com
Author also forgets what it takes to build fanbase of a size to even have this crowdfunding compaign. Larian was founded in 1996 and they did kickstarter for D:OS in 2013. Majority of game studios rarely live for 10 years even if they manage to release successful title.
I wont even start on the fact there been very short timeframe of Kickstarter hype. Today studio without a big name can barely get $100,000 and with current interest rate attracting extra investments is even harder because to make even very small game you need at least $200,000.
I talking from experience since I (with co-founders ofc) also trying to build game studio making original hardcore buy-to-play games. We already have not-so-indie team of 15 people, but our burnrate is laughtable compared to any VC startup.
Yet making games is extremely difficult business: you need a lot of highly skilled and motivated talent; budgets and deadlines are always insufficient; and even then making deals with publishers is hard and deal negotiation can easily take months while cash gap can easily kill you.
Building community big enough for successful crowdfunding will takes years and keeping people who give you money happy is almost impossible. Majority of developers from Kickstarter hype times failed miserably here. It's simply impossible goal to most game developers with tons of loyal fans, let alone some random SaaS startup.
This might be one of the most childish takes I have ever witnessed in the wild.
"hey, now don't expect quality, it's not like we can deliver it"
Either way, the AAA take on Larian's success is extremely telling - especially some of the mocking/hostile takes. They aren't going to learn a damned thing.
After the many AAA trainwrecks this/last year, everyone should understand game development is hard and most games will likely suck. That's fair. But most games these days suck because they're actively made with anti-consumer practices as their foundation. That's not fair to consumers, and devs need to learn this lesson, because their corporate bosses won't.
Then of course there's Star Citizen...
The core game they're building is not too bad, it's just not even reaching 1% of the promises, and they SOLD those promises.
I'm not betting on whether or not it will be a good game in the end (for many what it offers is already enough to have loads of fun), but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind they won't ever reach 50% of sold features developed, because it's impossible. I've been in enough project to recognize massive feature creep and the need for a proper reset, and SC passed that years ago, now they're in the "you better not release because you're fine as long as it's in dev, but once released the chicken will come home to roost".
Another big issue is that, even if they somehow did it all, reached 100% completion, they're sold so much advantage left and right that the game would HAVE to be pay to win. It's already pay to win by design before even existing in its final form.
I don't have any right to tell people how to spend their money or what they should enjoy, and I have paid my fair share of "overpriced" stuff I enjoyed, but my main issue is that I was really into the idea of another AA/AAA single player story-driven space game and Squadron 42 seems further away today than ten or five years ago.
There are now viable and enjoyable gameplay loops. You can do all the things with spaceships. The absurd level of scale has been delivered. But, the game is a mile deep and an inch wide (the exact opposite problem to Elite Dangerous) - there is very little content. It's also a buggy mess.
I am also somewhat upset with my purchase - in the intervening years I have grown to have less time, and the gameplay is too realistic/hardcore for a casual. I probably won't be playing it.
Regardless, your stance on the game is problematic from a factual standpoint: 2 minutes in the game would prove you wrong to anybody - a result that can be replicated a couple of times each year for free.
Add another 0 to that. Not even joking.
It has taken such a long time to make that the technology stack it's built on is now horribly outdated, but it's also far too big to redo in a new and more fit for purpose engine.
They should have stopped adding more features years ago and instead spent as much effort as possible to get the basics done. I honestly don't think it can be recovered at this point.
Brandon Sanderson was not lucky, he worked hard.
Companies should align product with customer expectation, the problem is when the product is shares of stock instead of the consumer product.
Knowing what gamers want isn’t hard. They want games that don’t suck. You might try to build something great, and only end up with something good. But if your only real passion is making money, then the games you make will never be “good” no matter how much money they make.
Larian grown to 450 people to build it and it's just internal staff. It's hard to imagine how many more people worked on localization, voice-over, QA / LQA and as countless contractors to on whatever aspects they couldn't do in-house. It can be very well be 1000+ people.
I not trying to say it's impossible to make good games, but making one at this scale it is literally like a rocket science.
This meant tireless focus on the nature of making an enjoyable game. Not addiction science, not investor pandering, not holiday release cycles... fun, story, and player agency.
It's really takes a lot of work on financial and investor attraction side when you making game that likely cost more than $100,000,000. Amount of bizdev talent and work required to pull it off is not that far from "making a good game" part.
See the amount of vampire surivors clones on Steam.
Oh wait…
48% negative return on money put in. Not exactly great.
The best part about this is that they're one of the few developers who are making co-op games. I really appreciate that since I can play with a friend on the couch.
Have we re-invented pre-regulated-to-death stock markets?
Regulation Crowdfunding, passed by Congress in 2016, added an exception to the 1933 ban on selling unregistered securities to the general public. Companies may now do so, but with two limits. The company may raise no more than $5m total in a 12-month period through this route. And individual investors are limited to investing no more than 5-10% of their income or net worth, across all crowdfunded companies they invest in, also in a 12-month period (5% for lower incomes and net worths, and 10% for higher). The details on the 5-10% of income or net worth formula are here: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...