The Portal Has Opened... - by subgames
june gloom on 24/4/2012 at 03:12
Timothy Leary? Really?
Shadow on 24/4/2012 at 03:24
A few hours later and this has a whole five backers... methinks this isn't going to end well.
Which makes me feel sort of bad, honestly. They obviously put a decent amount of work into this, and Stephen Russell? Dayum.
Sulphur on 24/4/2012 at 05:54
It was a great electronic novella. 900K for what's essentially Dear Esther filtered through the Windows GUI, though? What the hell are they remaking it out of? Diamond gauze, lapis lazuli, and the things that electric sheep dream of?
subgames on 24/4/2012 at 08:44
Keep in mind Kickstarter gets 5%, Amazon 3.2%, and the IRS somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-35% and state taxes near 10%. Each being calculated based on the original total raised, not staggered one after the other, so that's about $478,800 gone in the blink of an eye which roughly leaves about $422,000 left for development give or take.
Then come the other costs: developer salaries, utilities, game engine license fees, software, computers, and other overhead and it shrinks even further.
Doesn't look like all that much anymore, does it? Considering the (
http://www.develop-online.net/news/33625/Study-Average-dev-cost-as-high-as-28m) average single-platform game is $10M and the average AAA Next-Gen game budget these days is $18-28 Million, its comparatively chickenfeed.
Considering Homer can transport you to a "virtual past" comprised of "virtual people" to interact with (so you can find out what happened to the real ones), the Dear Esther comparison isn't an accurate one.
Still, $900k is *a lot* of money to try and raise regardless of the source and if there aren't enough fans that care about this type of game -- just as the mega-publishers say there aren't -- then it may indeed be an quixotic battle with a plastic spork as a weapon.
Sulphur on 24/4/2012 at 20:21
I'm aware that the Dear Esther analogy is somewhat inaccurate. It's the closest thing I could think of that features semi-linear non-interactive narrative based on exploring the dead past.
Keep in mind that when it comes down to it, the body of people you've assembled is impressive, but the focus seems to be on a whole bunch of writers. That's great - gaming needs better writing - but remember that you're advertising this project to gamers. I don't see many actual game proven developers in there. The reason why Fargo and Schafer's Kickstarter projects worked is because they're known quantities in the gaming industry, and in the case of Schafer, a more or less proven one. They traded on nostalgia in the hope that the gamers of the current day have a thirst for the oldschool game experience that's not been served to them for more than a decade, and they were right: there's quite a thirst for it.
Now I'm merely speculating but I'm guessing that Portal, when it released, was popular, but not as popular as Wasteland, Fallout, or Day of the Tentacle or Full Throttle. I'm going to speculate that there was even a bit of discussion over whether Portal was a game to begin with. In short, it was an art game before Art Games were a concept (Infocom may lay claim to the first Art Game, but that's a discussion for another time). The bottom line is, unfortunately, this: Portal is in a niche smaller than the one occupied by old Lucasart games and post-apocalyptic CRPGs, and perhaps not as fondly remembered by as many people.
That's going to seriously dent your ability to collect based on nostalgia, which leaves you to advertise marketable features to the current-day gaming crowd - and they're all gonna think a) 'Portal? A rip-off of Valve's game?' or b) 'These guys are trying to cash in on a franchise that doesn't belong to them'.
Given the current pick-up rate on the project, there seems to be a bit of a problem because of the above reasons and, maybe, you're attempting to trade on nostalgia a bit too much.
This is just me thinking out loud, but maybe you should cut the spiel, show a proof of concept if you can. At this point, no one can really assume the project's going to be funded by appealing to nostalgia alone: you want to appeal to all of your core audience which is probably not just those people who played the game in the 80s. You ought to be emphasising the reasons why people who don't know (or don't care) about the original Portal should be excited about this game, and put 'em up front and centre.
subgames on 25/4/2012 at 01:20
All very excellent points, Sulphur.
faetal on 25/4/2012 at 11:15
It is important though, given the surge of old devs waking up IP for kickstarters, for some of them to fail. Over time, devs should be able to gauge where the threshold is for what is worth reviving / re-booting.
Renault on 26/4/2012 at 23:24
I don't understand why they put such a small window up for donations. One month to reach 900K? Wouldn't 3-6 months have given this thing a little better chance of succeeding?
