Grats CoE!

Yanocchi

On reaching 900k!

whilan

Posted the news in the two other threads about the kickstarter to help get attention.  They just have to keep it that high. They don't have it secured just yet.

Dragnelus

Thats maybe 1-3% of what they need for the game to be great. I will check it in a few years..

lunawisp

Yay. Well done everybody. Now lets reach for those stretch goals.

And ignore the people trying to rain on our parade, this is one milestone on the long trek to a new game, we deserve a small celebration

Yanocchi

With the main fundraising goal complete, now that "stagecoach" is ready to depart into the tricky world of MMO game development! :skull:





Derek Smart once said that making games is like walking through a minefield blindfolded with mother-in-law giving directions. O.o

But will try to remain optimistic, hope CoE achieves great success!  

GrumpyHobbit

Yanocchi said:

Derek Smart once said that making games is like walking through a minefield blindfolded with mother-in-law giving directions. O.o

I guess that explains the quality of his work, I just thought is was incompetence. 

drakeordanska

Dragnelus said:

Thats maybe 1-3% of what they need for the game to be great. I will check it in a few years..

Another financial expert here.

So what's your specialist area of business and finance?
Investor?
Game Studio Manager?

Kyleran

drakeordanska said:

Dragnelus said:

Thats maybe 1-3% of what they need for the game to be great. I will check it in a few years..

Another financial expert here.

So what's your specialist area of business and finance?
Investor?
Game Studio Manager?

Software development project manager, multiple industries, 17 years, I know what it costs to make, regardless what the product is.

They need a lot more money. Lets hope with 20 days to go they double or even triple what they have received so far.

drakeordanska

Software development project manager?
So not gaming?

Hey I know nothing about you so im not arguing just asking as caspian is quite confident in that number and I know his histroy

Avanah

Dragnelus said:

Thats maybe 1-3% of what they need for the game to be great. I will check it in a few years..

Can you link your Source?

Zultra

We will still have people being rather cynical about CoE even 2 years after the launch of the game "will not happen"...

drakeordanska

I'm waiting for the nay sayers to change again.  First it was kickstartrr will fail, now it's the ks is not enough, then it will be it want get enough ppl playing, and lastly subscription won't be adequate 

Kyleran

drakeordanska said:

Software development project manager?
So not gaming?

Hey I know nothing about you so im not arguing just asking as caspian is quite confident in that number and I know his histroy

From my experience in development, along with years of observing this industry I know game creation is more challenging than what I deliver regularly.

While the game industry frequently works off the backs of their employees even more than most other industries, development is expensive which is why so much of it has shifted offshore.

My firm has an average employee rate of $77 per hour (all costs including overhead) in the US, $24 for India, $20 for HK and $14 for Manilla.

Most game development is done in US but even an indie operation must be running between $40 to $50 an hour no matter how much the squeeze is on.

Once you know the number of work packages (or stories if Agile) and the average cost to deliver on one you can pretty much figure the budget needed, plus or minus 25% to 50%.

IMO a full featured MMORPG can't be delivered for much under $20M, at least not at the quality a modern game is expected to have.

CU will probably come in around $10M when all said and done, but they secured $6M at start of Dev, I'm sure they have more now.  

They are delivering a PVP only focused fragment of a full MMORPG, this title is promising more, so it is going to cost more unless they go the MVP route.

You can't break "the triangle" of development with "elven magic," so I think my guesstimates (yes, that's a real word) are sound unless I see proof of some efficiency that I'm unfamiliar with. (there might be)

Morwynn

20 Mil seems a bit high, but I am neither a financial expert nor game developer.  I do understand that much of that cost is creating content, which CoE has stated they will not be much. They are just giving the players the tools and incentive to create their own stories and quests. Hope it works out for them. Anyway Grats CoE and Caspian and we can hope the next 20 days will provide enough income for those stretch goals.

Yanocchi

Miracles have happened in the past.

Face of Mankind was an innovative, fun and immersive sci-fi MMORPG/MMOFPS, at least during the first years when it launched more than ten years ago. That game was made with a smaller team and a smaller budget than what CoE has right now.

The problem is that it is not easy to grow and transform a small budget indie game so much that it can rival big budget games. Games take their shape and it is harder to reshape them much later.

I believe Chris Roberts made a smart choice in changing the path of Star Citizen after getting much more crowdfunding than he had anticipated. It would have been a lot harder or impossible to change anything dramatically later. It was a big risk but fortunately there are now some signs that Star Citizen is beginning to shape into a persistent universe game according to the new vision.

Octagon7711

Congrats and continued success.

Slapshot1188

Zultra said:

We will still have people being rather cynical about CoE even 2 years after the launch of the game "will not happen"...

We will still have fans defending a blatantly unfinished game 2 years after "release".  But that's not really what this thread is about is it?   They hit their target which I thought was much too aggressive so they obviously did a good job picking it.  My guess is that they end up in the $1.5M to 1.75M range but at this point I would not rule out anything.

Distopia

Slapshot1188 said:

Zultra said:

We will still have people being rather cynical about CoE even 2 years after the launch of the game "will not happen"...

We will still have fans defending a blatantly unfinished game 2 years after "release".  But that's not really what this thread is about is it?   They hit their target which I thought was much too aggressive so they obviously did a good job picking it.  My guess is that they end up in the $1.5M to 1.75M range but at this point I would not rule out anything.

So the game is going to be blatantly unfinished 2 years after release?

drakeordanska

@Slapshot1188 ;

Indeed they did hit their target and I am impressed that you admit you was wrong about that. A lot of the nay sayers on this forum can't admit they are wrong.


@Kyleran

I don't know the figures but yours seem a little out if we consider wages per hour etc.

I guesstimated that the average wage in soulbound would be $15 (its hard because I am European) with 15 employees would mean their wage bill would be:

(15*15)*40=$9000/week wages.
So with 50% of their current known budget they have 77 weeks worth of wages left.

Now they state that they intend to expand their team so I would say that they would be spending more than 50% on wages. But with an expanded team they will have money for maybe 70 weeks wages which takes them to Q4 2017 the estimated release time.

As for you comparing the cost to the "average MMORPG" those games are pretty much all cookie cutter theme park MMORPG's with voice acting, NPC quests, constructed dungeons, and hand crafted worlds.

CoE will be a procedural world with no NPC quests (typical mmorpg quests that is), their will be no voice acting and no constructed dungeons.
So you have more knowledge then me what does removing most of the typical mmorpg features save them? I would bet that they could place nearly 80% of their current budget on staffing with those savings and still have the game out on time.

Also count that the post KS fund raising through donations / IP stores (for those that can't get into the KS due to regional issues) then they will increase the amount of cast they have by at least another 500k.

Unfortunately people keep comparing CoE to the old fashioned MMORPG's when working out costings and that doesn't work when a lot of their features will not be included in the game.

Mors-Subita

Kyleran said:

drakeordanska said:

Software development project manager?
So not gaming?

Hey I know nothing about you so im not arguing just asking as caspian is quite confident in that number and I know his histroy

IMO a full featured MMORPG can't be delivered for much under $20M, at least not at the quality a modern game is expected to have.

If you exclude marketing costs... DAOC was 2 million and took 18 months to dev with a crew of around 30, Everquest was around 3 million total and also had a much larger crew. The matrix online (if you exclude the 8.5m of marketing) was like 5m as I recall.

On the other hand you have pieces of poo like AoC and Star Wars which cost upwards of $100m.

Considering they aren't going on a public marketing blitz and considering the way they are handling their marketing I don't think that that is a concern so we don't need to worry about them adding marketing costs to the dev costs.

They already have $500k that Jeromy put in himself, plus $500k of other funding, plus whatever the other people in the initial crew ponied up. Given that this is a crew of 15 people who came together to make their dream, they are probably running on minimal salaries/etc, and if you've seen their office they've dumped little to no money into decorating.

So if they stopped at $900k that would put them pretty much at the $2m mark and that is a good number to start, especially if they already have all the talent they need and they are just paying overhead and minimal salaries. That also means it will be easier for them to secure additional funding if they need it after the fact.

SpottyGekko

I predicted that CoE would reach their funding target "without breaking a sweat". Seems I was right.

Congrats to the CoE team !

Now they just need to build a solid fund raising webpage and come up with a list of ongoing incentives. They still have another $19M or so to raise if they want to produce a quality MMO. But I'm sure they're working on that already...

drakeordanska

Looking at kyleran 's profile it doesn't actually look like he is he expert he claims to be. Well not going by his posts.


Therefore I am going to take all he says with a pinch of salt. Especially going from the rough calculations I made (and i mean very rough)and the fact he or she is treating CoE as a cookie cutter mmorpg

Slapshot1188

drakeordanska said:

Therefore I am going to take all he says with a pinch of salt. Especially going from the rough calculations I made (and i mean very rough)and the fact he or she is treating CoE as a cookie cutter mmorpg

Dude, no offense but you used $15 an hour as the basis for your loaded wage rates for a development team...

Ummm...  that's just not realistic.   that's what folks that flip burgers in McDonalds want...

Grelf

I have lost a lot of faith in this game since the last design journal was released and specially with the handling of the kickstarter project. Congrats, I guess, I had no doubts it would get funded easily. But I personally don't have much reason to celebrate.

drakeordanska

Slapshot1188 said:

drakeordanska said:

Therefore I am going to take all he says with a pinch of salt. Especially going from the rough calculations I made (and i mean very rough)and the fact he or she is treating CoE as a cookie cutter mmorpg

Dude, no offense but you used $15 an hour as the basis for your loaded wage rates for a development team...

Ummm...  that's just not realistic.   that's what folks that flip burgers in McDonalds want...

I was going on the tram earning / taking minimum wages to see the game finished.
Also said an average wage.

I also took an average wage in the uk £10 and added 50% on to convert it to usbut since I am eru I didn't know the average wage.

I quite clearly state rough calculations 

drakeordanska

Besides I am sure I saw somewhere that Caspian had said their current costs are 40k a month. That means the 90k is 22 months worth of expenditure without expanding the team