Questions about pledging and FIG

The issue is, again, the gas tank thing. When you have a small but steady drip flowing in, it doesn’t matter how steady it is if it’s too small to actually prevent hitting zero at the minimum burn rate. They have a team of about ten people actually employed full-time to work on the game (which would cost tens of thousands of dollars a month at even fairly low rates of pay), and once they hit zero money left, that’s it. They basically have to fire everyone because they just can’t pay them — it doesn’t mean that development simply slows down, it means that development stops.

Like, the Fig campaign is happening specifically because Patreon didn’t bring in nearly enough money to keep them afloat until the game’s finished.

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500k isn’t much for development, but it still is a lot for a crowdfounding campaign. The gains once the game is released need to be factored in too I think.

About the covering, I agree. I just discovered about the game from Core-A-Gaming’s video and tried it for the weekend. I loved it, but before that I didn’t even hear about it.

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I think part of the issue is also that the game is kind of in a catch-22 situation where the most obvious people to promote the game to are FGC regulars, but the FGC is actually not really the core market for this game, it’s people who are kind of on the outskirts of the FGC. That’s why I think it would be really helpful to get this game on stream, because some of the stream monsters who understand high level play in fighting games but aren’t able to play at that level themselves are the prime targets for this game.

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Woah, 10 people costs 10g’s a month? I need to get into that profession xD
I also thought this was like fanmade Halo game being made for PC for free in the sense its being developed by the devs on their own time with no schedule or due date. <- Obviously not exactly the same since this game is asking for money and will charge people to play :stuck_out_tongue:
But anyway, stopping production now doesn’t mean it’s shut down forever though, right?

Kinda figured, and wished they used Kickstarter instead =/ No hate towards Fig, it’s just Kickstarter is vastly more popular and by just having it on their, would draw in a bigger crowd with 0 advertising or mentioning of the game to anyone.

I’m also curious why Fig was chosen over Kickstarter.

That’d be $1000 per person, which is actually super low.

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The ability to make investments on Fig was a major factor in it being chosen over Kickstarter. The fact that over half of the game’s funding so far has come from investments suggests that this may have been a wise choice.

Stopping production temporarily with the intent of picking it up later is very problematic. If you’re a programmer or artist who is working on a temporary contractual basis, it is very difficult to commit to coming back to some super long term project and work on it in bits and pieces every so often as the designer gets enough money to pay you for one month of work. Your preference is likely to be long-term work that can commit to paying you for a certain period of time. Firing a team of ten people and then hoping that in a year or two or three you can just call them all back together and everyone will have time and interest in picking up where they left off is not realistic.

And hiring a completely new team comes with its own set of problems. It is not easy or realistic for a new developer to go from zero to 60 when picking up a previous developer’s work, which can end up adding substantial fees required to get them up to speed.

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Well when you break it down like that >_>

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I guess what I was trying to say is: the game is super playable with great online connectivity RIGHT NOW (as the Free Weekends demonstrated, thank you for doing those so I could see it in action!)

I’d love to just buy the game now and get whatever updates come (even if those are just finishing Arg and Lum; the other modes and stages and costumes aren’t really interesting to me and I would have loved to back a “scaled back” roadmap to just polish what’s there).

I suppose if I can’t pledge for that then though, I can kick in on Patreon and get people to try it that way? Patreon feels bad to me, I’d rather pay for something as a one-time transaction. Now that I’ve gotten to play the game I at least know it’s something I like, and I totally get the ethos behind why you guys went for Patreon and it makes a ton of sense from a dev standpoint. As a consumer, though, a game really has to be your favorite game to “subscribe” like that and spend on “indefinitely”. I like what you’re doing but $120/year is a big commitment of entertainment budget, and I like lots of different things.

Anyways, I hope things go well. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk or unrealistic with my comment, I’m a software guy myself and know these projects aren’t cheap. Was just trying to say I would have loved to see what’s there now released as early access, so I could get friends to try it out and play with me :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I suppose one alternative to crowdfunding might be that you could just sell the game on Steam Early Access. There’s definitely been tons of Early Access games that are less complete than this. Though personally, I’ve always felt that Early Access has some fairly significant issues and crowdfunding might yield a better final product if a successful campaign is possible.

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I think Sirlin Games, with its fantastic track record of multiple Kickstarter projects shipped on time, is trying to avoid the quagmire of unending Steam Early Access with no significant updates for months, which could be a very real risk here. The minute he sells one copy, he’s committed to delivering a completed game - which can’t be done unless he then sells $500k of it quickly enough.

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Are there other options though?

That’s a very fair point I did not consider @ArchonShiva. Thanks for pointing out that flaw in steam early access (tbh PUBG and Kerbal Space Program are the only early access games I’ve ever bought)

To @SaSSolino’s point though, what other options are on the table, if the clock strikes midnight on the fig campaign?

Yeah, no doubt Steam Early Access has issues. One problem that hits Fighting Games in particular is that when you release a product through EA, your playerbase tends to kind of trickle in rather than all arriving at once. This can result in very few people to play against online, which is devastating to fighters and other multiplayer-reliant games. I feel that both Rivals of Aether and Toxikk (an FPS) suffered from this, despite being good games that handled EA well.

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Well, looks like I called it with EA. It’s fine I guess. Just got to make sure to get a little more promotion between now and then so they can get a solid influx of players at the beginning and get some good early review scores.

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It’s better than the game getting cancelled or put on hold until another campaign or something :slight_smile:

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