Hello!
We have a team of 5 - a concept artist, a sound designer/composer, two professional Unreal programmers with industry experience and released indie titles, and a hobbyist programmer with released indie titles. We're currently prototyping two ideas and we'll ultimately settle on the one we like most and that we think is most marketable, but in a general sense, one of them is a 3D character action style superhero game with a comic book art style, 12 hours or so in length, singleplayer game and the other one is a supernatural detective immersive-sim (a la dishonored) FPS-RPG about 8 hours or so in length. We're confident we can get either one done in 2 years if we expand to about 10 people and so our budget would probably look like 2,500,000CAD, maybe 3,000,000 CAD if we push it for the superhero game and 1,500,000 to 2,500,000 for the detective FPS, as 2 year projects. That's accounting for salaries + potentially needing to bring on contractors and freelancers + paying for mocap, musicians, etc + middleware licenses. We're aiming to release on PC, home consoles, and Switch.
Now, looking at competitors for the superhero game, my outlook is not so good. It's hard to compare it to most of the competitors out there because those rely on established IPs for sales - Spider-Man, Batman, Suicide Squad, Avengers - and the few that are original IPs… Infamous had the leg-up of being a 1st party game and Prototype didn't really go anywhere. However, looking at similar games to the detective game, they tend to sell quite well - gameplay wise the most similar would be Dishonored, Bioshock which are both successes (albeit Dishonored did trail off, the 2nd one sold better than most people think IIRC nonetheless), and concept wise there's LA Noire which was also a success, The Wolf Among Us which sold pretty well as far as I know… and there's not that much right now to directly compete in that specific subgenre, while also having very broad appeal.
So ultimately, this is a 5 person team where those in charge of it have released games before and worked in the industry, but as a team this would be our first project together. How much do you think is a reasonable ask for funding for either of those games? I think ultimately if we can look at a higher budget overall then we can adapt the game to be able to be done under that budget but still take advantage of that headroom. We're looking to pitch with a demo that is basically a vertical slice of the first couple levels of the superhero game, or the first “episode” of the detective game (the game being effectively split into episodes which are unlocked as you finish each one).
