Looking at other Kickstarters, it usually takes 4-8 months for an established company to prepare their KS campaign/project. That’s assuming working full-time with an existing budget on a mature, preexisting engine ( UE4, Unity, etc… ) ( Chris Roberts invested hundreds of thousands, if not up to a million, just on preparing his KS campaign for Star Citizen. David Braben probably invested quite a lot too, considering he had his entire company’s resources at his disposal… and that’s all pre-KS, a luxury which we don’t have ).
Multiply that timeline by a factor of 2-3 because we’re working as volunteers in our spare time.
Then multiply it again by a factor of 2-3 because we’re doing our own tech and tools, which aren’t mature yet ( learning the workflow, learning physical-based lighting for artists, debugging, etc… ).
If we take the average, that’d be 6 months * 2.5 * 2.5 = 37.5 months or a bit over 3 years of work, just for the same “quantity” of work in preparing the KS campaign.
There are KS that launch faster of course; those that ride on their owner’s legacies, or that only present some concept art and show no in-game content; but due to our “vaporware” reputation, that’s not something we can do. So, in order to prepare a KS with a decent amount of content in it, 3 years working part-time on a proprietary engine sounds about right ( shock ! ).
Well sure, but I was more thinking along the lines of what caused your schedule rebaseline, was it:
Feature creep? (if we just include X, we’l have a much better product)
Too agressive a schedule? (It’s just software, I can have it done by lunch)
Missing an item on the critical path? (Wait, we have to do what?!?)
AWOL/Losing team members? (Has anyone seen Todd?)
Those kinds of things. Obviously you guys didn’t spend the last 12 months twiddling your thumbs and I’m sure everything is much more polished, I’m just wondering what was the root cause. I’m just interested in the software development portion of this all.
That and we’ve actually had quite a bit of feature creep ;). To be fair though I do think most of our feature creep will be worth it in the end. If we had released back then it would have been a very simple, bland campaign video.
Actually in reality, it is most like a donation system IMO. Some ppl can treat it as a pre-order system only by pledging low, others pre-order + donation… I myself have pledged to 2 KS’, both in the $35 range.
Most forms of investment are a gamble.
I’d say KS is a cross between gambling and donation.
One makes a decision to pledge (and how much to pledge) based on how likely they believe they are to derive some utility from it if it is successful, and how much that utility is worth to them.
Where it crosses into donation is the utility can simply be ‘a good feeling’ from having contributed to some project or person who’s goals you support.
From Wikipedia:
Utility is an important concept in economics and game theory, because it represents satisfaction experienced by the consumer of a good. A good is something that satisfies human wants. Since one cannot directly measure benefit, satisfaction or happiness from a good or service, economists instead have devised ways of representing and measuring utility in terms of economic choices that can be measured. Economists have attempted to perfect highly abstract methods of comparing utilities by observing and calculating economic choices. In the simplest sense, economists consider utility to be revealed in people’s willingness to pay different amounts for different goods.
