Sociable Soccer - Jon Hare - Kickstarter

[Lorfarius]

And you are welcome to enjoy that game but it leaves me cold free or not.

I'd prefer a proper sensi reimagining .

*sigh* The point was a Sensi style game was developed for next to nothing. It doesn't need 300K to be of a similar style, the new game JH is promoting isn't what people want because it's not Sensi. Every other version of it has failed because it's not what fans want.

[Clipper]

*sigh* The point was a Sensi style game was developed for next to nothing. It doesn't need 300K to be of a similar style, the new game JH is promoting isn't what people want because it's not Sensi. Every other version of it has failed because it's not what fans want.

That game is only sensi style in its presentation/graphical style. And whilst that has some bearing on how much it would cost to develop it isn't the be all and end all. You are making the same assumptions as Angel into how much it would cost to develop.

Basically they seem to have set a target that is what they believe to be the actual cost to deliver as opposed to other kickstarters that knowingly pitch low to try and get a "win" then hope for lots of extra on top.

Now it looks like there may not be enough fans wanting this new version to allow it to be funded (although it is early days). That is the nature of kickstarter but squabbling over the budget set with no knowledge of the realities of costs of developing a game are unfair at best.

[gone fishin]

Yeah, they should have set the online and clans stuff as stretch goals and lowered the overall project cost and timescale. Say £150k and 6 months...

[Clipper]

Yeah, they should have set the online and clans stuff as stretch goals and lowered the overall project cost and timescale. Say £150k and 6 months...

yeah they probably should've lied like other kickstarters have. Or tried to get matched funding from a publisher, like Team 17 so they could ask for only 150. But even then if you go that route you rarely mention the publisher deal upfront as some people won't back as they'll think the publisher will stump up the whole amount.

There is a crowdfunder running now struggling to get funded and there is a perception that the publisher backing is preventing people backing as the devs have to keep pointing out that it wont be funded if they dont get the target.

[angel]

they should go off and make the game, then try to sell it. like, y'know, a game.

[Timmo]

Maybe they could somehow use the internet to get the funding they need to do that.

[Clipper]

No, god no, the only people who should be allowed to make games are those with large amounts of money already who can self fund. Or be able to persuade a publisher their game will sell because we all know publishers are happy to take on risky projects. Either that or chirpy bedroom coders from yesteryear who can work for no money for years and live on dust.

fucking kickstarter allowing fans to support projects they like... bastards

[gone fishin]

No, god no, the only people who should be allowed to make games are those with large amounts of money already who can self fund. Or be able to persuade a publisher their game will sell because we all know publishers are happy to take on risky projects. Either that or chirpy bedroom coders from yesteryear who can work for no money for years and live on dust.

fucking kickstarter allowing fans to support projects they like... bastards

The bedroom coder thing is a bit of a problem. Back in the 80s and early 90s you had teenagers writing games while living at their parent's house. Or developers in their 20s who would be happy to live off of a pittance.

Problem is you can't have that when you're in your 40s and have a family, unless you're wildly rich and can self fund - like the Darling brothers.

But then people don't want to hear about crowd funding campaigns that actually pay decent salaries, like making a game is some kind of public service like being a nurse. How dare they ask for £30k in salary!!!

Crowd funding is so strange. Some things (Star Citizen, Occulous Rift, Shenmue 3) do incredibly well, to the point where people will literally give thousands for utter tat like a virtual ship. Then others, like this or the Dizzy campaign, fail miserably with people moaning about the project.

Maybe it's a British thing...

[Escape]

There's a bedroom-coding scene again, so it's not about a fair target, it's about competition. Lots of people could write this game for far less money, and just because they're not actually pitching to, I think that's still a factor.

This would've worked ten years ago, when Hare's team were still in a fairly exclusive position to offer an authentic remake. Now, I'm not too sure that they could do any better than other teams, and 2006 won't help their case.

[Fry Crayola]

There's no point reducing the target to get funds to produce something if it leads to conditions under which you won't work. They won't get £300k to make the game, but for £100k they won't make it anyway.

[Gabe]

Basically they seem to have set a target that is what they believe to be the actual cost to deliver as opposed to other kickstarters that knowingly pitch low to try and get a "win" then hope for lots of extra on top.

Now it looks like there may not be enough fans wanting this new version to allow it to be funded (although it is early days). That is the nature of kickstarter but squabbling over the budget set with no knowledge of the realities of costs of developing a game are unfair at best.

You seem to be speaking quite definitely about the budget for this. How do you know £300k is exactly what is needed to make the game?

Squabbling with no knowledge, indeed.

[Fry Crayola]

Agreed - I'd shift the consoles and variety of club teams to the stretch goals. The online play seems to be the main USP so it'd be harder to move but perhaps not impossible.

Another avenue is early access - get the game playable and reasonably well featured then grow over time, with plenty of user feedback, Prison Architect style. Football games lend themselves well to that, I think

[Clipper]

You seem to be speaking quite definitely about the budget for this. How do you know £300k is exactly what is needed to make the game?

Squabbling with no knowledge, indeed.

I said that "they seem" to have set a reasonable target, just an opinion, hardly definite.

I only gave an opinion on the budget as I thought it unfair when people called it into question, comments that it was too much or they should be able to make it cheaper. I showed my working out which leaves them 218k for 12 months for at least 5 devs plus other stuff. That is not alot of money for that period of time.

If anything they have underestimated it. I have charged similar for 3 devs (2 of which senior) doing a project for 1 year albeit I had to include a profit margin in the daily rates.

Agreed - I'd shift the consoles and variety of club teams to the stretch goals. The online play seems to be the main USP so it'd be harder to move but perhaps not impossible.

Another avenue is early access - get the game playable and reasonably well featured then grow over time, with plenty of user feedback, Prison Architect style. Football games lend themselves well to that, I think

I think ditching consoles is unfortunate but necessary in short term but they have picked their strategy and probably have to live with it. Unless they take feedback and cancel/relaunch.

[mushashi]

This is what the developers of Shovel Knight posted as a useful rule of thumb development budget guide, and they only asked for $75K to make their game, got $328K in the end, still ran out of money and lived off begging and borrowing for 5 months! Which just goes to show how badly people lowball Kickstarters! This echoes the $80-100K a year per dev rule of thumb I've seen over the years, which includes all overheads, not just salary, as they point out in the article they posted about their dev experiences:

[b00dles]

Why do people think that Jon Hare has enough money to just make this off his own back anyway? He's not exactly in the industry at the moment and I doubt he gets paid that much being a lecturer.

I've no idea but somehow I doubt he's rolling in it and is trying to fleece everyone.

[mushashi]

The majority of responses in this thread really do make me think back to the comment I made a while back about publishers and Kickstarters, when people were moaning on about publishers and their lack of risk taking and greenlighting of niche games. Now the boot is on the other foot, it turns out most people will react in exactly the same way as the publishers are, too risk adverse and demanding ever lower dev budgets to mitigate their financial risk...

[robotattack]

I was comparing the £1 Million budget of SWOS, a game made over 20 years ago to this spiritual sequel, which has a fraction of the budget. He's not exactly being unreasonable with the amount. And he's asking for less than 10% of the budget of the barebones budget of Bloodstained, let alone the fully fleshed out ~$10 Million version they will deliver.

The £1 million budget was for Sensible Soccer 98 and even then Jon is being a little generous with the truth as they were given that budget as part of a three game deal which was Have A Nice Day, Sex Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll, and a new Sensible Soccer game. Most of that money got blown on SDRR and that was in years of development.

They even changed it to a six-game deal to keep GT Interactive sweet (who had inherited it after buying Time Warner who made the original contract). In the end, GT was only interested in releasing the three Sensible Soccer games that had been committed to in the new deal, eventually letting them off with just two of those. This is all documented here.

tl;dr He didn't make one game with £1 million.

[Rev]

Literally no-one would take a well-known franchise to Kickstarter if they could afford to avoid it. Either they'd pay themselves or, more likely, they'd just not bother.

I maintain the problem is that they're not getting enough off each person. Pay £75 and you can make a team up, like Banana In Drive et al, pay £150 to receive it in an Amiga Big Box. Etc.

The stuff that is there is shit. £60 for a "one size fits all" t-shirt, which obviously really means "one shirt fits no-one". Pay an extra £40 to have your name in the credits. Then it jumps an extra £150 to put yourself into a pre-made team?!? To actually make a team up, something that will cost them literally £0 to implement, is £2500. Fuck off.

They're wank, wank, wank rewards. If they made the people who have paid in the first few days who are clearly the most interested pay more, say £75, they'd be on £85k now and everyone would be certain it'd get to its target. Instead they've got £12 from 1145 people, out of 1460 backers which is an appalling average of £18 compared to £91 for Shenmue 3. Drift Stage that was only asking for £20k managed to get an average of £21.

[Clipper]

yep decent rewards would tempt me to push up my backer level.

[Rev]

yep decent rewards would tempt me to push up my backer level.

Everyone who has backed at this point would do that. Maybe not much more for some, but anyone who has bothered to pay anything, with 20+ days to go is very interested in seeing the game made.

[Guest]

Thing is, it's a numbers game.

For the £300k, they need 20,000 backers at the lowest pledge level (that's not the £12 capped one). Realistically, for a UK based soccer game that's not pulled up any daises for 20 years - well its not realistic.

There may be that number of people who'd like the game, sure, yet the number that will pre-pay through Kickstarter is never going to represent them.

For some comparison regarding famous games/creators/etc - Godus got just over 17,000 pledges.

So they'll need to get more people interested than PM did, with the huge hype machine that surrounded him.

I reckon they've just done the numbers on what they need to pay everyone at the levels they want to be paid at, and forgot about what they COULD get. I think they'll be lucky to top 8,000 people.

I'll support it, yet the figures don't really add up - especially because there's been a downturn in videogame funding on Kickstarter.

It seems a pity that there's been a total lack of research on this one.

[Gabe]

I said that "they seem" to have set a reasonable target, just an opinion, hardly definite.

I only gave an opinion on the budget as I thought it unfair when people called it into question, comments that it was too much or they should be able to make it cheaper. I showed my working out which leaves them 218k for 12 months for at least 5 devs plus other stuff. That is not alot of money for that period of time.

If anything they have underestimated it. I have charged similar for 3 devs (2 of which senior) doing a project for 1 year albeit I had to include a profit margin in the daily rates.

My bone of contention was that in your subsequent post you followed that up by saying all other KS projects were lying by stating a lowball figure - and yet based on your own sketchy maths that's probably exactly what is happening here, too.

[b00dles]

I haven't backed it but I'm not sure I will, things like the wanderer which I recently backed, or even hello neighbour (which didn't meet it's funding) sounded a lot more interesting to me and I suppose that's the problem, it's all perception. Even if it may cost 300K to make a new sensi (which I agree, is doubtful) it's also something that has been tried and failed miserably before, I'm more interested in things that are a bit more of an unknown quantity or really things that don't exist, even if I do think an arcade footy game would work, a much more basic initial game would have made me go for it.

Shit, even if it was Cannon Fodder 3, Wizball 2, or Sensible Golf 2016 would have made me more likely to pledge but all of the previous sensi iterations have been really poor versions of SWOS, even the XBLA one, which by all accounts should have been the exact update it needed with minimal tweaking, never really worked. That more than asking for 300K is what has put me off.

[Rev]

I haven't backed it but I'm not sure I will, things like the wanderer which I recently backed, or even hello neighbour (which didn't meet it's funding) sounded a lot more interesting to me and I suppose that's the problem, it's all perception. Even if it may cost 300K to make a new sensi (which I agree, is doubtful) it's also something that has been tried and failed miserably before, I'm more interested in things that are a bit more of an unknown quantity or really things that don't exist, even if I do think an arcade footy game would work, a much more basic initial game would have made me go for it.

Shit, even if it was Cannon Fodder 3, Wizball 2, or Sensible Golf 2016 would have made me more likely to pledge but all of the previous sensi iterations have been really poor versions of SWOS, even the XBLA one, which by all accounts should have been the exact update it needed with minimal tweaking, never really worked. That more than asking for 300K is what has put me off.

Cannon Fodder 3 could only turn out well, yeah.

(It seems harsh to break that bubble.)

[b00dles]

Cannon Fodder 3 could only turn out well, yeah.

(It seems harsh to break that bubble.)

Well I thought 2 got a bit too strange with the alien planet stuff but I would definitely play and back a cannon fodder based on the original premise, I still think the control of the team and that view worked surprisingly well which hasn't been replicated since. I always thought a DS version with the stylus could have worked well.

Very of it's time and place, I'm well aware but I still think it has some more potential, possibly in a city with destructible environments like those shacks that satisfyingly blew up with a grenade but could kill your mans if you didn't move them out of the way of the door flying off etc.

I might be rose tinting it like a motherfucker but no more so than attempting a sensi after what, three attempts to do a new version?

[Gabe]

@boodles - Wanderer looks very close in style to Gods Will Be Watching, is it the same developer?

[b00dles]

@boodles - Wanderer looks very close in style to Gods Will Be Watching, is it the same developer?

Erm, I don't know what that is but I'm a huge fan of Another World and Flashback and always disappointed Eric Chahi seems to have left the industry, something about that rotoscoped animation and athleticism of the main character which has gone out of fashion for whatever reason, will look up this Gods Will Be Watching business

EDIT: Shit the bed. I'm going to have to buy that right now, point n clicks being my favourite genre going. Thanks much!

[Pistol]

It better include Cannon Soccer.

[Gabe]

Erm, I don't know what that is but I'm a huge fan of Another World and Flashback and always disappointed Eric Chahi seems to have left the industry, something about that rotoscoped animation and athleticism of the main character which has gone out of fashion for whatever reason, will look up this Gods Will Be Watching business

EDIT: Shit the bed. I'm going to have to buy that right now, point n clicks being my favourite genre going. Thanks much!

I haven't played it, btw, I used to have it on my wishlist but it's not meant to be very good.

[b00dles]

I haven't played it, btw, I used to have it on my wishlist but it's not meant to be very good.

Well I took one for the team at £7... it's a bit bloody obtuse.

Nice idea and I'll have to give it some more time but that wanderer thing is a bit more action based a la Flashback (or at least that's the premise) but it isn't Devolver and the gang although a similar style, I see what you mean. Even though GWBWU has very spindly legged sprites.

Anyway, this is meant to be a socaiable soccer thread, so I'll be quiet about rogue other kickstarters and odd other genres that I miss from Amiga days.

But where the fuck is a kickstarter for Supercars III?