Sigh. There’s nothing about senior staff taking pay cuts because there’s no more senior staff. On top of that, I’d be surprised if Chris himself drew any more pay from this point forward.
As some people have pointed out here, the Kickstarter was for 1.1m but the hope was for much more. Shutting down isn’t the result of thinking we wouldn’t make the 1.1m, it’s the result of knowing what our company would become and what we’d have to compromise to make Wildman if we just barely got the 1.1m.
In addition to the AoEO cancellation (which was the company’s major source of ongoing funding), there had been 2 other unannounced projects in development. Over the last few months, both were cancelled by their respective publishers for reasons wholly unrelated to the development that we were doing. No company can survive without any paying projects
To all the people saying “Do SupCom3!”, well, we can’t. We don’t own that IP anymore, because as some people have pointed out, we sold it to Square Enix (along with Dungeon Siege IP). Why would we do that? Well, the biggest reason was Demigod. We funded that game ourselves and went into debt to do it. Stardock helped with funding to finish it, but the entirety of early development was done by GPG alone, funded out of our own pocket. When Demigod resulted in a commercial failure, we still had loans for the development costs that had to be paid back and the IP’s were sold to do that.
People need to understand that Kickstarter is a last-resort for nearly every established developer who uses it. Every time you see a well-known company put something up there, you need to understand that they are not doing that while also turning down $10m deals from a publisher. A Kickstarter is a huge sign to the world that the developer in question is on the precipice of failure.
Edit:
I want to respond a bit to people who blame GPG for failure to ‘support’ some of their games. The financial reality of the way contracts work in the game industry makes it so that ‘support’ doesn’t exist unless the publisher wants it to exist. Very few contracts outside of online or persistent titles contain any money whatsoever for patches or post-release support of any kind. The support that GPG has provided its products over the years (in the form of patches) have all been paid for by GPG itself, not by the publishing partner.
Now, you may not think that’s such a big deal. But game industry contracts are like loans. Say GPG gets $5m to make a game. When that game ships, GPG makes royalties on a sliding scale. So GPG gets 10% royalty on the first 50k copies, 20% on the next 150k copies, and say 30% on any remaining copies. That royalty money that GPG makes goes to pay back the $5m in development costs first, so the developer makes NO MONEY WHATSOEVER until the publisher has already made a very healthy profit.
During this time, GPG still has bills, payroll, etc. So it has to sign new contracts to keep money coming in. Which means the people who work there are working on the products that have actual money coming in and milestones that have to be met. With nearly no chance of making any money from shipped product, why do people expect the developer to fund post-release support for that product?
So please, if you want to get mad about product support, focus your anger on the publisher.
. Mal sehen was jetzt bei rauskommt.. Das ist eigentlich so sexy, dass sie daraus ne eigene Kickstarterkampagne machen könnten ^^
