I'm starting to wonder what Inafune did with all that Kickstarter money. Creators are contractually obligated to put it into their games. He got almost $4 million, sure, not enough to create an epic AAA game, but far, far, far, FAR more than most indie devs get. And he pumps out this POS?
Let's assume there is a fairly small number of staff on this game. Twelve people sounds good.
At complete consistency with never scaling up or never scaling down and that everyone is being paid a living wage of $50k, you're looking at $600,000 a year. Now let's assume they just did nothing, didn't get paid, and sat on their hands until January of 2014 and the game was completely done and they were just not working on it through all of 2016. That's two years of $600k on salary and nothing else. So that's $1.2 million for our hypothetical scenario of twelve people.
So you're right, in that scenario, $4 million is a lot! But if you extrapolate that to all the other costs that go into something like this (translation, payment to the organization running the kickstarter, scaling up, QA, kickstarter cuts, backers backing out, community management, outside contractors, etc.), then that number keeps dwindling until $4 million is nothing.
You don't just buy assets with your kickstarter money and assemble them into a good game, at least without looking like a Unity horror game on Steam Greenlight.
The problem isn't that four million is this absurd game number for indie game development, it's that it's a pretty small number that Inafune still managed to waste. To even get that number, they had to promise a lot that caused compromise after compromise until this is what we got.
