New (Game) from the TA(and Co.) Developers

What you are seeing here is the harsh reality of the games business today.

What has changed that the games industry is so crushingly unwilling to invest in unusual games. If Wildman for example could be made for $2 million wouldn't it only need to sell a couple hundred thousand copies to cover the costs? It may not make a profit but it shouldn't be that hard to break even.

I'm just pulling numbers out of my *** but if they could get $5 per sale it would only be 400k sales to make back $2 million. Also it might be less profitable per sale but don't the Steam discount sales have ridiculous volume to pad the numbers towards the end of a game's shelf life?

And that's why I'm sort of glad I never got involved in the first place. It's just too . . . dynamic for a boring person like me.

In any case, I'm glad that Indie games seem to be reinvigorating some of the older style of development that was seen in the 80s and 90s, when game development wasn't such an expensive risk.

This is sad to hear, I hope GPG's employees can find work elsewhere.

Hopefully that should be fairly doable. Seattle has a huge number of game development companies and bunch of other large companies as well like MS, Google, Facebook, Amazon etc.

That's good to know. I have been through redundancies before, and it's not fun.

This might be a stupid question, but does not Uber have less employees than GPG and is doing a huge game, where GPG is doing a smaller game with more people? Am I wrong or how many people work at Uber?

I really don't think they can make it. The interest just doesn't seem to be there. There's relatively low interest on the GPG forums (even lower than on here), where people are mainly Supreme Commander fans, and people who don't know GPG in the first place don't have much reason to support them based on a few videos that poorly explain what the game is.

I've pledged, for the sole purpose of supporting the company that made Supcom and demigod, but I just haven't seen any reason to be excited about Wildman.

This does in a way show how good PA is as an idea. It did a lot better than wildman.

one does see it in the new video update that its very hard for CT.

The pledges per day aren't that bad though. The news of the layoffs didn't seem to have an effect (yet).

New, tough video update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ga ... sts/388863

Completely devastated. I don't think Wildman is any kind of mainstream game, and I think things for Kickstarter will change a lot in 2013 - people will become more sceptical.

I think AoEO was the last title we saw from GPG. Pity. Chris Taylor and Jonathan Mavor used to be my absolute idols.

Chris pretty much self-defeated himself with really strange decisions (maybe he evolved and I didn't, or vice versa).

Jon is still going strong in my mind - PA pretty much shows how much people want games like that, and how much they are yearning for an alternative to the omnipresent MOBAs.

I thought all the time the same, strange decisions... but... then I found this nice little article about GPG... and I think it explains a lot... and also shows that Kickstarter is really the future for Game-companies like Uber and hopefully GPG...

http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/ ... ered_Games

Well, to be fair, the first two games that Uber did ARE MOBAs.
(Side note: Been playing SMNC out of curiosity lately, and I'm really enjoying it. It's the only MOBA I've ever enjoyed, in fact.)

If this is true, I will be supporting Wildman. I know Wardell is a controversial fellow himself, but he has never struck me as being dishonest.

It hurts to see GPG/CT like this.

Wildman seems like a decent game. I first saw the PA KS 3 days into funding, and now have done the exact same with Wildman ( coincidence). Might as well make a comparison of the two.

PA:

I knew exactly what I was getting with PA: An RTS which promised to explode the boundaries of what had been done before. Funding was dedicated to expanding what could be done, focused on the RTS genre.

You start a base, build units, smash planets, destroy the enemy. It may be complex by design, but as a potential backer, I knew exactly what to expect (and the trailer was epic... that definitely helped). I knew of nothing like PA, thus I could only imagine how awesome it could be. PA showed me what it was, and let me decide whether I liked it.

PA hooked me with its premise, and then squashed my concerns as time went by. I believed that PA could be spectacular as soon as I saw it. After 3 weeks, enough of my doubts had been removed to back it. The only reason I continued looking for updates was my initial fascination. Without that, I probably would have just let it be another thing to wait until release/reviews to consider getting.

Wildman:

I don't know exactly what I'm getting. Is it going to be more similar to Diablo 3, or LoL? Starcraft or Supreme Commander? Seems a lot like an RPG, so where do the RTS elements come in? Am I a single character that just helps control an army, or do I control everything? Too many questions to have. Therein lies the problem.

I don't know what to expect from the game. The only thing to base my understanding on is some words from the dev's, and a short video of very limited gameplay. "Cool" is a very relative term. I have nothing to base my impression on, so I can't believe it yet.

I have no ridiculous expectations for Wildman. There is nothing to make me want to go yell at my neighbours/friends how awesome it could be. All I can really say is that it looks like a mix of a few other games, and some alleged RTS components. Comparing it to so many existing games doesn't help, not when I can only think that each genre in Wildman is beaten by already existing games purpose built for that genre. Not terribly exciting unfortunately.

There just seems to be too much scope and too little depth at this point.

~~~~

I'd really like to hear what CT thinks the game could be, regardless of money. If he has a vision of something spectacular, and can convince me it's possible, I'll probably fund it. It worked for PA

Seems like the firings were just a result of too many people with too little to do. They don't really phase me.

EDIT: Just looking over the backer rewards, and noticed that they seem to be fairly generous with giving the core game away. Something that would destroy my impression of Wildman would be any sort of 'pay2win' system. Money should never be used to replace skill. Ever. AoE:O was like that (afaik, I never touched it since I heard it was pay2win). Don't do this with Wildman.

Did CT know kicktraq?

Because... he could make it.

It wasn't going to make it BEFORE the news of GPG's layoffs was revealed. By the end of yesterday, it was somewhere around an expectation of 90% of their goal. It shot up quite a bit today, no doubt from fans wanting to support GPG through tough times.

Really, it's hard to tell at this point. Unlike PA, GPG actually (apparently) needs this money to continue existing, so he has a reason to be worried.

Compare it with the PA Kicktraq, and you notice that PA had a much better start.

Chris was probably so worried due to the 3 straight days at ~$20k. If numbers like today remain, they should be fine. I believe it will be close though.

^ Like posted above, the trend was plummeting quite quickly. I'd get nervous.

Oh, that's bad. But this is reality. No interest, no game.

I think it actually went very well so far, it always slows down a lot and picks up at the end. Look at Elite and other games, even PA... in the middle it was not even sure to reach any stretch goal, but the last few days went crazy and it over-exceeded expectations...