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[Quadraphonic]

Salary is only part of it - office space, licenses, health care costs, etc

Right, I know. Social security expenses, payroll, 401k matching, right. I'm an adult.
I know additional expenses, but the math still isn't there. Targeting for Fall 2016 means it'll need to be done in 6 months.

Even with a 20% overhead for employees, making them now cost $120k annually, that's still two dozen people WELL PAID on a team for a PC port for a game that should already be running on the PC and just needs polish.

Skullgirls got hammered initially for their large IndieGogo amount until they broke down the cost to show where the money would go:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/skullgirls-character-crowdfunding-breakdown-what-that-150k-is/

Harmonix hasn't done anything like that to assuage complaints.

 

[FyreWulff]

I don't think Sumo Digital is willing to work for breakeven cash.

Once again, for a forum that is supposedly full of video game industry hardcore fans, so few people understand how much costs are involved in making games, even just ports.

 

[Instro]

If it dies, it dies.

 

[Kyou]

Right, I know. Social security expenses, payroll, 401k matching, right. I'm an adult.
I know additional expenses, but the math still isn't there. Targeting for Fall 2016 means it'll need to be done in 6 months.

Even with a 20% overhead for employees, making them now cost $120k annually, that's still two dozen people WELL PAID on a team for a PC port for a game that should already be running on the PC and just needs polish.

Skullgirls got hammered initially for their large IndieGogo amount until they broke down the cost to show where the money would go:
http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/skullgirls-character-crowdfunding-breakdown-what-that-150k-is/

Harmonix hasn't done anything like that to assuage complaints.

Dude they have to licence music and other things

 

[GuitarAtomik]

Don't forget they have to test each and every song and there are over 1000 of them.

 

[Quadraphonic]

Then this isn't financially viable.

 

[BennyBlanco]

nobody asked for this

i'm surprised they got this much

 

[Doctor Ironic]

Then this isn't financially viable.

Yeah that's what we're finding out. So why are you mad at them for testing the waters?

 

[diffusionx]

Even with a 20% overhead for employees, making them now cost $120k annually, that's still two dozen people WELL PAID on a team for a PC port for a game that should already be running on the PC and just needs polish.

I think the overhead is more like 100%.

$1.5M for a port does not seem like an exorbitant number to me.

 

[Effigenius]

Well of course it failed on pc. It wasn't $5 or less.

 

[mosdl]

I think the overhead is more like 100%.

That is what I've always heard, 80-100% depending on location.

 

[SapientWolf]

Well of course it failed on pc. It wasn't $5 or less.

The average Star Citizen pledge was around $100. This was just too little too late.

 

[Gtagentleman]

Deserved

 

[_machine]

$1.5M for a port does not seem like an exorbitant number to me.

Definitely not; you most likely wouldn't even get the price down much if you wanted to outsource it all. There's a lot more costs to development than just employee salary (just to mention a fraction, you have QA, TRC, localization, licensing, release marketing).

And yes; the very basic employee overhead for most game companies is well above 50%, and can absolutely get to 80-100% if you include costs that can be divided across all employees.

 

[joms5]

Deserved

I second this.

No one should be surprised by this. Harmonix needs to branch out. Do something other than a music game. Or if you're going to do more music related games something along the lines of Fract. It was refreshing.

 

[Aurongel]

Surprised it reached what it did, then again it's hard to feel sympathetic towards this product.

Shame for Harmonix though, they've been struggling for quite some time now. I smell a studio closure in the making.

 

[Head.spawn]

With no option to transfer content OR DLC that I previously bought on consoles, they aren't going to see a cent from me.

 

[Nokterian]

I am not surprised by this seeing how harmonix was towards PC it is pretty laughable on how they want to turn it around with this.

 

[firehawk12]

With no option to transfer content OR DLC that I previously bought on consoles, they aren't going to see a cent from me.

When there was no plan to let people change platforms on the consoles, I can't imagine why people would have expected this though.

And this thread makes it seem like someone at Harmonix personally violated our dear lord Gaben or something. lol

 

[Head.spawn]

When there was no plan to let people change platforms on the consoles, I can't imagine why people would have expected this though.

And this thread makes it seem like someone at Harmonix personally violated our dear lord Gaben or something. lol

It's not something I expected, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I happen to be a fan of pleasant surprises. That particular one being a non-starter unfortunately.

As for your second comment, if people think Harmonix specifically avoided the PC platform like the plague without a good reason, they wouldn't be wrong. Bringing a kickstarter 9 years later, they aren't owed any goodwill or money.

 

[Storm360]

Campaign failed

Not sure if it's been posted, but this Reddit post sums the entire thing up pretty much

https://www.reddit.com/r/Rockband/c...g_the_fig_campaign_which_would_be_the/d1ohaig

 

[Parham]

Campaign failed

Not sure if it's been posted, but this Reddit post sums the entire thing up pretty much

https://www.reddit.com/r/Rockband/c...g_the_fig_campaign_which_would_be_the/d1ohaig

They don't trust Fig

Have there been problems with Fig in the past?

 

[Storm360]

Have there been problems with Fig in the past?

iirc, it's "new platform", plus possible sketchiness on the investor side? I know there were some concerns with Psychonauts 2, but I was only a backer of RB4, not a investor so I haven't really looked into them

 

[Doctor Ironic]

People think Fig is shady because it was formed by Double Fine's former CFO and people are still really mad at them for irrational reasons. If Obsidian starts a crowdfunding campaign on Fig I guarantee you nobody's going to scream about conflicts of interests for their staff being on the board of advisors, same for Brian Fargo.

That and the main thing that differentiates Fig from other crowdfunding platforms is the ability to invest and get money back instead of goods-based rewards, but - this was for Psychonauts 2, I don't know if it was true for the other projects - the investing is a fucking terrible idea. I think it was something like the game had to sell, not including copies from the campaign, 200,000 copies at full price before you would even break even.

 

[LewieP]

I think people are also suspicious because of Doublefine's willfully misleading maths when pitching Psychonauts 2. They heavily implied that they expect Psychonauts 2 to sell as many units at full price as the first game did when heavily discounted. Any platform that allows for and encourages misleading investors is automatically suspicious.

HMX's real mistake was not doing RB4 for PC whilst they were doing the other versions. The costs involved with doing an additional port after the fact, rather than concurrently, are significantly higher.

Obviously this is compounded by their history of snubbing PC gamers with Rock Band, invoking the specter of piracy like it's the 90s, and charging $50 for a crowdfunded late port.

Pricing was probably the real killer. People (reasonably) expect some kind of discount for taking on the risk of paying not for a game, but for the promise of a game. It shouldn't have been more than $25.

 

[GhostTrick]

Then this isn't financially viable.

Well of course it failed on pc. It wasn't $5 or less.

Considering how RB4 bombed on consoles, leading to the MadCatz CEO to leaves and the price to be slashed multiple times... I guess PC wasnt the problem

 

[hamchan]

This is not surprising. Harmonix pretty much has no goodwill with the PC crowd after ignoring them for years.

Now that they're in a pretty bad position compared to their golden years they finally announce a PC port... only the PC crowd has to fundraise it.

Yeah, this wasn't happening.

 

[Spyder_Monkey]

At least they were noble. I mean one guy tried to use kickstarter to buy the rights to Life is Strange from Square Enix.

 

[hodgy100]

Considering how RB4 bombed on consoles, leading to the MadCatz CEO to leaves and the price to be slashed multiple times... I guess PC wasnt the problem

Rock band 4 wasn't the cause of madcats's financial issues. They stated they were happy with its performance in their financial reports.

 

[farisr]

Considering how RB4 bombed on consoles, leading to the MadCatz CEO to leaves and the price to be slashed multiple times... I guess PC wasnt the problem

RB4 "bombed" on consoles because the actual game was missing essential features/options, and the bundles were priced too high at launch (The full set bundle cost more than an xbox one console bundle w/ 5 games over here when it launched.)

I don't know about the madcatz situation, but apparently the post before mine indicates that RB4 was not the cause.

 

[Grief.exe]

I'm not going to lie, this response is infuriating.

 

[FyreWulff]

I'm not going to lie, this response is infuriating.

Truth hurts.

 

[Baron von Loathsome]

I'm not going to lie, this response is infuriating.

"1500 people threw 800k at us. There's no demand for Rock Band 4 on PC."

Come on.

I sincerely hope that they revisit it in the future with a better thought-out campaign.

 

[Dragon Puncher]

Harmonix is really going down the drain it seems..

 

[hamchan]

I'm not going to lie, this response is infuriating.

It's true though I guess. It's completely their fault that there's no audience for them because it's not like they've ever tried to grow the genre on PC, but it is true that it's not viable right now.

They missed the boat and that's on them.

 

[chrominance]

"1500 people threw 800k at us. There's no demand for Rock Band 4 on PC."

Come on.

I sincerely hope that they revisit it in the future with a better thought-out campaign.

To be fair:

1) People who just wanted the game (or other rewards) and were not investors contributed only $200k of that total.

2) 1500 people is a staggeringly low number for game sales unless you're really small-time, like one-person indie team or a very small localization house. One point of comparison is Gaijinworks, a localization company that's been putting out extremely limited-edition releases of PSP games on UMD. Class of Heroes 2 sold something on the order of 2500 units at $30 or so a pop, and that was barely enough to justify the project. We're talking about a game that's already built, released on a long-dead format to a very niche audience. (Localization is obviously still hard work, but it's not the same as porting an existing game.) This campaign attracted less interest than that.

Did Harmonix screw the pooch on the campaign? Was Rock Band 4 destined to fail on PC for reasons other than lack of interest (i.e. structural issues with music licensing, Harmonix prioritization in the past burning the PC market, no way to bring over existing user's DLC on other consoles, etc.)? Quite possibly. Those are all questions I'm sure people will be asking now that the campaign is over. But the base claim of "1500 supporters of Rock Band 4 PC = big expression of interest" is very, very hard to take seriously. At best, we can say that the results are still inconclusive because this campaign had a number of issues facing it, and so can't be taken as an accurate measurement of interest.

 

[Animator]

"1500 people threw 800k at us. There's no demand for Rock Band 4 on PC."

Come on.

I sincerely hope that they revisit it in the future with a better thought-out campaign.

Do you think 1500 people is a sign of demand?

 

[Baron von Loathsome]

Do you think 1500 people is a sign of demand?

800k from 1500 people ain't bad numbers. Not to mention that Harmonix makes most of its money off the DLC anyway.

 

[hesido]

God damned LCD's with their input latencies killed the genre, more than anything.

 

[shiftplusone]

"1500 people threw 800k at us. There's no demand for Rock Band 4 on PC."

Come on.

Frog Fractions 2 had 2,571 backers on kickstarter and that's a sequel to a weird website

1500 for a project of Rock Band's size is ridiculously low

Fig is part of the problem. Based on this campaign, Rock Band is part of the problem as well

 

[SirNinja]

Yeah, this was never going to work, for a whole bunch of reasons. Most of the people who wanted RB4 in the first place already got it on either of the consoles; at the time, there was zero evidence they were ever going to bring it to PC (which itself already has the likes of Rocksmith, etc.) Many of those people have invested in the game with stuff like DLC (and/or instruments that might not be compatible with PC), making them even less likely to migrate or double-dip.

Then there's Fig itself, which is not as widely "trusted", for lack of a better word, as Kickstarter. Even Psychonauts 2, whose Fig campaign was announced during the VGAs, just barely got funded there (only 16% more than the target). Asking $1.5 million on a site like that to fund a PC version of a game that already exists? No chance. Looking back at it, I'm surprised it got as much as it did.

 

[Baron von Loathsome]

Frog Fractions 2 had 2,571 backers on kickstarter and that's a sequel to a weird website

1500 for a project of Rock Band's size is ridiculously low

Fig is part of the problem. Based on this campaign, Rock Band is part of the problem as well

I'm not saying 1500 isn't low. I'm saying they got a crapton of money for how few backers there were.

 

[FyreWulff]

800k from 1500 people ain't bad numbers. Not to mention that Harmonix makes most of its money off the DLC anyway.

They said in the AMA that even 5x the number of people wasn't sustainable as a full fledged version.

Basically they wanted to have the support to give PC an actual version of Rock Band 4, or not do it at all. They didn't want to put RB4 PC out and then be forced to mothball it due to being a money pit.

From what I gathered in the AMA, they would have been happy with the Psychonauts 24k. They weren't looking specifically for Rocksmith's 500k numbers to be sustainable.. but 1-5 isn't.

This was a company that was forced to stop releasing RBN songs on Wii because the highest selling RBN song on Wii was like, 12 copies. They've also said in years previous they don't like the idea of platforms subsidizing other platforms or in the case of Pro, they didn't want regular users subsidizing Pro users by making the songs 3$.

Frog Fractions 2 had 2,571 backers on kickstarter and that's a sequel to a weird website

1500 for a project of Rock Band's size is ridiculously low

Fig is part of the problem. Based on this campaign, Rock Band is part of the problem as well

They've said they're sure Fig is not the problem because their sources show that 97% of a Kickstarter's PR comes from the campaign itself, KS itself only gives you about 3% of your audience. Fig acts as a quasi-publisher and does PR for you and helps you out with it.

 

[chrominance]

They've said they're sure Fig is not the problem because their sources show that 97% of a Kickstarter's PR comes from the campaign itself, KS itself only gives you about 3% of your audience. Fig acts as a quasi-publisher and does PR for you and helps you out with it.

I do wonder if Fig did hurt them in the end, though, because after the initial wave of publicity I basically forgot the campaign existed until very recently, and never heard anything about it in any of the media I follow. I could just not be paying attention to all the other places Fig promoted RB4 PC, I guess.

 

[FyreWulff]

I do wonder if Fig did hurt them in the end, though, because after the initial wave of publicity I basically forgot the campaign existed until very recently, and never heard anything about it in any of the media I follow. I could just not be paying attention to all the other places Fig promoted RB4 PC, I guess.

It could have. I dunno. The downside of KS is now that everyone uses it, you're gonna get buried over there anyway - early on you could get money just from people browsing through for laughs, but now you're unlikely to see a KS unless someone actively promotes it at you.

Also, IIRC basically all these non-KS sites that allow various forms of investing couldn't exist until recently anyway until Congress and the SEC figured out to handle internet crowdsourcing. KS is more a payment processor than anything, they don't help you out at all otherwise.