Shroud of the Avatar: $3 Million Raised
Just a quick little note: Shroud of the Avatar crossed the $3 million threshold in its ongoing crowdfunding campaign today.
Thought you all might like to know.
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Mark Lemmert says: -
Mark Lemmert says:
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“Ultima 7 Revisited”: Spot the New 3D Objects – The Ultima Codex says:
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Happy Anniversary to Ultima IX – Forgotten World says:
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Anthony Salter says:
Queue Dr. Evil memes. Being serious though, that’s a lot of money for a small team. It could go a long way toward comfortably paying the devs while finishing the game. If Portalarium had 20 employees, that would equal a $150,000 salary per employee for one year. If they assumed natural/logical roles and pay (as I’m sure they do), there would be a ton of money left over for external assets and expenses to improve the game further.
What would scare the shit out of me is if SotA actually did raise (even if largely crowdfunded) $36 million or the like. Hopefully a leaner and meaner group will focus more on regular releases and mechanics implementations. Art can always catch up, but having proper gameplay first saves more time in the end.
At $20 million or more I fear we’d have motion captured “source” animations, Madden-style physics libraries interpolating skeletal rig animations and rigid and soft body interactions, short films to further hype the game’s crowdfunding campaigns and fan base, score by Hans Zimmer and Zbigniew Preisner, Japanese billboards with Richard Garriott’s face on them and all sorts of bizarre yet lovely things.
I wonder what an Ultima game would be like if there was a practically unlimited budget, like that of a large government project’s (Apollo, for example)? Put maybe a 12 month timetable on it and a dictator in charge as the “Design and Implementation” manager.
If it still let you push cannons around and fire them, break down doors, attack friendlies, sail ships and row skiffs, hole up and camp, have someone stand guard during said activity, get better equipment through fighting or commerce, take or pay for shelter, mix reagents to effect, study programmatic ethics and morality, take torches, take other people’s food from their table, (K)limb fences, steal horses, fight pirates in ship-to-ship combat, descend into dungeons where cells are filled with mad children, create walls of magical substances such as fire and poison, murder people in their beds with a single cowardly strike, push around and sit in chairs, search dead tree stumps for hidden treasures, talk to horses, bake bread and butcher ducks, hear a pretty song on an MT-32 or equivalent and ends up receiving genuine hate mail likening it to devil worship or Dungeons & Dragons, then it has in my book taken all necessary steps to become a good Ultima game and hopefully will be the “ultimate” one.
Quite frankly, I would be satisfied if Portalarium just spent the money to buy back Ultima, then proceeded to dig U8 out from some ancient underground crypt at EA, and then finished the damned game the way it should have been in the first place. Stretch goals being The Lost Vale and a complete remake of a Ultima 9 in three-quarter view. I don’t ask for much.
Shroud should be cool too though.
The potential of the engine supports your assertion. If they could amp up the screen resolution and lift texture size and other memory limitations, it could be pretty crazy.
Brian Fargo said the budget for an entry-level AAA game (not an MMO) is in the range of $15-$25 million dollars. Games like Max Payne 3 cost over $100 million to develop.
Star Wars: The Old Republic cost over $200 million to develop.
$3 million isn’t really huge for an MMO. And there will need to be more than 1 year of development, so one year of salary isn’t enough.
That being said, Richard Garriot put in some of his own money, and they are seeking outside investors as well I believe.
There were no publicly promised stretch goals for $3 million, but it would be nice if they did something for the backers to celebrate this mile-stone like how Star Citizen has been doing.
What if they gave all the backers before the $3 million threshold a $10 credit for a digital add-on? The devs wouldn’t need to spend extra time or money to make a new item to give away. Nor would a digital item cost the team anything. And by opening the door to players in selecting one of those items (such as a crafting item), it might then encourage them to purchase others, further raising funds for the game.
It could be a win-win.
I’m familiar with the budgets (though not how they were allocated specifically) of AAA games, but to be honest it boggles the mind where this money is being properly spent. I can think of some possible improper expenditures, such as large salaries for “managers” and moderate to overblown salaries for content creators. There must also be an incredible amount of expenditures on what I consider “overhead”, such as sprawling office facilities, airplane tickets, expense accounts, press releases, television advertisements and asset creation solely for the purpose of promotion (CG trailers). Curt Schilling wrote the memo on this sort of thing, without realizing he was doing so.
When “The Game” is #1 in EVERYONE’S mind, the team doesn’t exceed 25 people and the money’s spent intelligently on delivering it, I find it hard to believe that more than ten million dollars are required to deliver anything but the most asset-laden, repeatedly-delayed, commercial library-dependent or outrageously-wasteful of games.
The biggest wastes of money I can think of are:
1) Expensive commercial/proprietary libraries/engines/etc.
2) Professional voice acting.
3) Professional motion capture.
4) Professional soundtrack, particularly a live orchestra.
5) Television commercials.
6) Retail distribution.
7) Retail/in-store advertising.
If one’s independently wealthy and wants to pay for it then do it. But the time’s better spent working on the actual gameplay, refinement, testing and QA. A good game has no need of expensive trailers, in-store advertising or any of that crap. Small teams should stick to developing only the game.
@enderandrew Giving store credit for new (or even old) backers is a good idea. It would be an excuse to test the economic systems without real money being exchanged yet. Once the bugs were worked out they’d feel more confident about releasing the real money update. Or Bitcoin update, as RG seems a fan.