1 hour ago, Tony Li said:

BTW, I noticed you wrote "maths." In the USA, people normally write "math." If you're in Canada or the UK, there are government and private funding programs such as the Canada Media Fund that fund indie games. Thought I'd mention it, although applicants generally need a strong team with a history of success already.

 

Thanks for that - 

I'm based in Australia - I've read the community here is really thin as most people with talent end up exported to the US though right? However, simple research turns up that wages are about 20% less locally, and with the AUD/USD exchange rate US staff become 20% more than the sticker price. I will look into government grants further but when I searched about a month ago, all I read was people complaining there was no support from the government. From your perspective is there any reasonable talent in Australia, or is that outside your wheelhouse?

1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:

It depends. Do you look or sound like someone who knows something about business or management? For some more information on what you're up against, I wrote some articles. There's one on finances of game development, another on starting a game company, and others.

 

Ok that helps... If you have time to read, I would love to hear your assessment of how compatible my background would be with something like this project:

I work in Private Equity / Corporate Advisory, so my job is basically raising money for startups and providing advisory services around governance and prepping for capital raising. We typically raise between $2.5m - 30m depending on the size of the company, but our clients are institutional so they would not be interested in something like this. This role also bleeds over to marketing, sales and distribution strategy for companies we invest in.

I have also founded two companies with successful exits, one national "Tough Mudder" style events company and one mid-tier Financial Services / Private Wealth / Capital Markets firm. In those companies, the largest team I was managing directly was 20 staff, but they were all in sales, so very different to dealing with developers. For that reason, I am not confident enough to try project manage the game development process myself. I also have web applications (full stack) development experience, so I have been able to watch Unity tutorial videos and follow them. My concern is that I have a lot of domain experience in certain areas, but absolutely no clue about this industry.

Looking at it from a Private Equity perspective, my gut would tell me that I should not invest in an industry I don't understand. On the other hand, this concept is a huge passion for me and I've been thinking about it for years, and history tells me that when my gut is this confident on a concept (in my areas of domain expertise), I should execute. 

What do you think, and with that context in mind, would you have any further advice?

1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:

You should let your technical wizard determine the proper engine for your game, don't you think?

 

Haha, very true! I just saw some demos and they looked amazing.

14 minutes ago, Sam James said:

From your perspective is there any reasonable talent in Australia, or is that outside your wheelhouse?

There's good talent in Melbourne.

21 minutes ago, Sam James said:

Thanks for that - 

I'm based in Australia - I've read the community here is really thin as most people with talent end up exported to the US though right? However, simple research turns up that wages are about 20% less locally, and with the AUD/USD exchange rate US staff become 20% more than the sticker price. I will look into government grants further but when I searched about a month ago, all I read was people complaining there was no support from the government. From your perspective is there any reasonable talent in Australia, or is that outside your wheelhouse?

 

Ok that helps... If you have time to read, I would love to hear your assessment of how compatible my background would be with something like this project:

I work in Private Equity / Corporate Advisory, so my job is basically raising money for startups and providing advisory services around governance and prepping for capital raising. We typically raise between $2.5m - 30m depending on the size of the company, but our clients are institutional so they would not be interested in something like this. This role also bleeds over to marketing, sales and distribution strategy for companies we invest in.

I have also founded two companies with successful exits, one national "Tough Mudder" style events company and one mid-tier Financial Services / Private Wealth / Capital Markets firm. In those companies, the largest team I was managing directly was 20 staff, but they were all in sales, so very different to dealing with developers. For that reason, I am not confident enough to try project manage the game development process myself. I also have web applications (full stack) development experience, so I have been able to watch Unity tutorial videos and follow them. My concern is that I have a lot of domain experience in certain areas, but absolutely no clue about this industry.

Looking at it from a Private Equity perspective, my gut would tell me that I should not invest in an industry I don't understand. On the other hand, this concept is a huge passion for me and I've been thinking about it for years, and history tells me that when my gut is this confident on a concept (in my areas of domain expertise), I should execute. 

What do you think, and with that context in mind, would you have any further advice?

 

Haha, very true! I just saw some demos and they looked amazing.

If you lived in the Bay Area, you're exactly the type of person I'd love to talk to about a possible partnership.  I'm working on my own project where I'm doing most of the tech, plus the game design.  It's the kind of thing where I'm working on it full time because I could afford to leave my job (I was working at Google in Mountain View) a year and a half ago to do this.  One thing I'm missing is business/startup expertise, but it's hard to connect with a person like that who also has a passion for a game project.

2 hours ago, Sam James said:

my gut would tell me that I should not invest in an industry I don't understand. On the other hand, this concept is a huge passion for me and I've been thinking about it for years, and history tells me that when my gut is this confident on a concept (in my areas of domain expertise), I should execute. What do you think, and with that context in mind, would you have any further advice?

Think beyond the Kickstarter campaign. Think beyond the development phase. Think about what you will do with the finished game. How will you market it, on what platform(s), and how will you make money back from the finished game? Once the game is launched, is your new company just going to work to support ongoing updates, or is your company going to make other games? Aside from Riot, hardly any company succeeds with just one game as its entire business.

9 hours ago, Tom Sloper said:

Aside from Riot, hardly any company succeeds with just one game as its entire business.

Even Riot has been working on more games. While they got really, really, luck with League of Legends, they've tried to be more. They've built several spinoffs from LoL and have more in the works, and they are also (according to their press release a few months ago) working on something else that is rather big. They've had hints of other projects for several years.

With about $1.5B each year from one product they're doing all they can to keep that money flowing, but even with that success they've still attempted to grow additional product lines.

Simply: Grow or die.

Your older success will dwindle and fade. Unless you're building something new that can help the company grow, it will dwindle and die.

I noticed you mentioned Wolcen - I've been looking quite a bit at that game because it's really inspiring.

A devoted small team lead by a person with strong game development skills who is himself willing to live on pasta and ketchup to build his dream can get a *lot* done for $400K. Mind you they're also selling their unfinished game as early access on Steam - Steamspy says 68K owners. Obviously what Steamspy says has to be taken with a grain of salt, and some of these owners will also be Kickstarter pledgers.
Chances are you won't get quite as far with the same money if what you can bring to the table is money and ideas.

22 hours ago, Sam James said:

I'm based in Australia - I've read the community here is really thin as most people with talent end up exported to the US though right? However, simple research turns up that wages are about 20% less locally, and with the AUD/USD exchange rate US staff become 20% more than the sticker price. I will look into government grants further but when I searched about a month ago, all I read was people complaining there was no support from the government. From your perspective is there any reasonable talent in Australia, or is that outside your wheelhouse?

As mentioned above, Melbourne/Victoria is great. Queensland/SA Goverments are getting on board too. It's the federal government who are cooked (they de-funded industry support that was actually making money for the taxpayer -- austerity for the sake of it!!)

If you're in Melbourne, look into Film Victoria, Creative Victoria, and local councils (e.g. City of Melbourne) for grants, and IGDAM is a good hub for community (there's likely equivalent IGDA chapters in other capitals...). There's also thearcade.melbourne (a local co-working hub), which was set up by the GDAA (who are also amazing - if you need to find your way around the local industry, they can direct you / make introductions).

The GFC decimated the local industry back in ~2008-2010, which led to a lot of developers moving offshore at the time. Many of the ones who remained have started a huge number of indie studios, which has really changed the way that the local industry functions now -- it used to be a lot of work-for-hire for US publishers, but now there's a lot of original IP work. The annual GCAP conference attracts about 1000 developers, so there's still a decent amount of talent here.

Wages are depressed in Aus compared to the US, and are depressed in gamedev compared to other tech firms. A veteran game dev can cost under AU$10k/mo here.

On 02/01/2018 at 10:22 AM, Sam James said:

I was doing the maths from 0r0d's post and it came out to around $150k as well which didn't make any sense given that it would mean a starting version of the full game with 3 acts and ~15 maps each would cost $6.7m which seems impossible to crowdfund. Especially given the guys that funded Wolcen raised ~$400k and it has lasted them 2 years now. (Maybe you could shed some light on how this is possible?)

$6M to make a Diablo style game sounds fair. Lots of "crowdfunded" games only get a small portion of their funds from crowd-funding, but use it as proof of market interest (and prototype funding) in order to attract further investment.

If your founders are extremely talented developers, they might be worth over $100k each... however as founders, perhaps they're willing to work for equity/ownership instead of salary. So instead of paying 4 founders $520k in joint salaries, you only pay them $120k bare living expenses between them all, and boom you just saved $400k that you can now spend on other staff (maybe 8x $50k salaried staff?).

21 hours ago, 0r0d said:

our clients are institutional so they would not be interested in something like this

To keep our company viable, we work in game-dev and also in serious games, which boring government (e.g. Austrade) and corporate backers can get behind. Perhaps you can identify some technology cross-over that you could use for both a game and a training/simulation purpose? e.g. For us, it's racing games and traffic simulation / driver training.

23 hours ago, frob said:

For more experienced needs or the big expensive hubs, I've seen $15K instead of $10K

A little off-topic at this point, but either the landscape in those expensive hubs has changed a fair bit since those numbers, or engineers are ridiculously underpaid in the games industry.

For Software Engineers at a decent size tech firm in a hub, you are looking at north of 10k/month compensation for a brand new college hire. Experienced juniors are often compensated to the tune of $20k/month. By the time you add the cost of health insurance, taxes, office space, etc. I'd be surprised if the fully-loaded cost of an engineer was much below $30,000/month.

Multiply those figures by 1.25-1.5x if you are looking at a really expensive hub (i.e. New York City or the SF Bay Area). Multiply again if they have 'senior' in front of their name.

4 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

either the landscape in those expensive hubs has changed a fair bit since those numbers, or engineers are ridiculously underpaid in the games industry.

Engineers are underpaid in the games industry (an entertainment industry) compared to tech industries.

delete this post i made many fatel errors and just shouldn't have replied