1-UP Show/CO-OP Alumni: Kickstarter: VG Culture Docu Series (210K Goal)
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Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
With Anthony Carboni! heh..
I don't care what it is, but you should do something with 8-4.
Zeouterlimits
Member
Still sitting in a will it / won't it tier.
Hope that they'll make it
.
Hope that they'll make it
.Livestream with Rev3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ueHpn4V-vw
Still just under their goal with a 13 days left. I hope they can make it. They're really cool people and this series could be really rad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ueHpn4V-vw
Still just under their goal with a 13 days left. I hope they can make it. They're really cool people and this series could be really rad.
BruiserBear
Banned
The budget for this seems extravagant to me. In the same way I can't understand it when people who record a gaming podcast insist on buying $500 mics.
In this day and age it's quite possible to produce some really good content without spending a lot of money.
I feel like they should have produced a full 20 minute episode, as a proof of concept, monetized that in some way, and then created a kickstarter to push it forward.
In this day and age it's quite possible to produce some really good content without spending a lot of money.
I feel like they should have produced a full 20 minute episode, as a proof of concept, monetized that in some way, and then created a kickstarter to push it forward.
Come back with a specific idea for this and you'll be the king of the internet.
Can you please provide a specific budget they should follow including figures for everything they already listed like travel, production, contractors, etc.?
Please include hourly rates for each person that will be involved in the production, and if you think someone should be working for free, make sure that is explicitly stated.
They are the ones with their hands out, they should be providing the detailed budgets.
Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
What about five years of the groundbreaking 1up Show as proof of concept? Or multiple series of Co-Op episodes, produced for almost nothing, offered to you for free, as proof of concept?
See, the problem is that the concept involves covering a range of subjects, and the funding budget includes a significant line item for travel. These guys are talented but we've seen about as much as they can do in the Bay area among their group of friends, for contemporary game coverage. The Cifaldi piece is what you've asked for, minus the "monetize it in some way."
If there's anything I can say after watching them actually operate as a successful business with commercial work, is that they've done the math, and the budget is appropriate for the quality product they will produce.
I ordered the Blu-Ray. I know I am safely in the hands of guys who will not send me some compression-muddied bullshit. These guys are pros.
It's all there on the Kickstarter for you to review if you're not just trolling.
They already did. And they'll probably get it.
I'm asking the backseat producers to back their assumptions it can be done cheaper without sacrificing quality.
enanogrande
Member
If this is extravagant, I don't want to think what the Polygon documentary must have been.
Ecto311
Member
Never even heard of that, just seen the trailer for it. They kept saying "best team" but then Arthur Geeze was in there.. I don't think he knows what "best" means.
Screw the haters, I really hope this gets made.
Use The 1up Show as proof of concept and all the previous work that the Area5 guys have done.
The documentary they did on SF2 is a great example of the work they do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gZBITO5GwI
Use The 1up Show as proof of concept and all the previous work that the Area5 guys have done.
The documentary they did on SF2 is a great example of the work they do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gZBITO5GwI
Not trolling. He asked for a lot more detail than the A5 guys provided. I'd be a lot more willing to back kick starter projects if they provided detailed pro formas. Most don't, and for the same reason they are forced to use kick starter, they lack financial understanding.
Not saying that is the case here, they actually do a better job than most at least outlining the outflow.
Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
They were actually totally ready to post a bunch of dry spreadsheets and cost analysis proformas. But, you know, that would have been way worse for them overall, Kickstarter-wise.
I'm sure they would be happy to answer any questions you might pose on the comments page. Like I said, for at least the last couple of years they have been operating successfully as a commercial video production company in the Bay area with a wealth of knowledge and experience in video games.
So they are coming from running a successful business, looking to launch a larger, non-commercial venture.
BruiserBear
Banned
YouTube ads? Maybe they could even double up the ads. Lots of people make money doing this stuff.
Contractors? See, this is the fundamental problem here. I think these guys could produce really good content with a couple $1,000 cameras and a MacBook Pro. The question really comes down to what is enough? For me it's probably a lot less than others. Some people just hear "this is how much we need" and because they like these guys they're fine with any number.
55k for backer rewards? Right there I'm already seeing a problem. The rewards should be reasonable, but not that costly. Who are they contracting to produce these Blu-ray Discs? Skywalker Ranch?
Man, Kickstarter has changed.
People used to ask for like, a few thousand dollars to help finish their indie title. Or to keep their podcast going. (<3 Comedy Button)
But at this point everyone has enormous dollar bills in their eyes, going crazy as to adding stretch goals up until a million goddamn dollars. It's crazy to me.
People used to ask for like, a few thousand dollars to help finish their indie title. Or to keep their podcast going. (<3 Comedy Button)
But at this point everyone has enormous dollar bills in their eyes, going crazy as to adding stretch goals up until a million goddamn dollars. It's crazy to me.
Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
Man, expectations for video production has changed.
When I started in television, a simple Dubner graphics generator to allow me to key a logo or text over 480i video cost $350,000.
There is plenty of dirty, lossy, crappy, cell-phone content to be enjoyed. I am looking forward to this being a professional production, from a studio of four who are asking for enough to fully dedicate themselves to the project.
When I started in television, a simple Dubner graphics generator to allow me to key a logo or text over 480i video cost $350,000.
There is plenty of dirty, lossy, crappy, cell-phone content to be enjoyed. I am looking forward to this being a professional production, from a studio of four who are asking for enough to fully dedicate themselves to the project.
Jack Random
Member
WhiskeyKnight
Member
Guys, guys. According to Kicktraq, this thing may not get funded.
That would be a shame. Video game culture is so weird, varied and cool -- it's a perfect subject for documentaries like this. If you haven't backed it yet please do so, and if you're already a backer lets bump this thread and help spread the word! I want to see this this thing happen.
That would be a shame. Video game culture is so weird, varied and cool -- it's a perfect subject for documentaries like this. If you haven't backed it yet please do so, and if you're already a backer lets bump this thread and help spread the word! I want to see this this thing happen.
They want to do something extremely high-quality and professional, and they want to be paid for their work. They've proven their abilities countless times, deserve the payment, and will probably easily get that payment through this Kickstarter, so why shouldn't they?
Again, please point out the specific parts of this chart you have a problem with, and exactly what numbers you think should be changed, how those numbers should be changed, and how that can be done without sacrificing the quality of the show:
It's commendable to Area5 for being transparent and thoughtful enough to full consider backer rewards for their Kickstarter. So many Kickstarters have gotten in major trouble by not thinking about it until it's too late.
How do rewards add up?
- If you want high-quality art, you should really be paying your artists what they're worth (which is true even for digital rewards)
- Same goes for music
- Shipping isn't cheap. At the current rate, there will be at least 1000 backers who get shipped something. Even shipping a t-shirt and disc will cost around $5. But many will be getting heavy packages that could cost $15-20+ to ship.
- Printing t-shirts isn't cheap, especially if you want high-quality t-shirts that won't go to crap after a couple washes. This feature says more than I ever could.
- Printing Blu-Rays isn't cheap, especially if done professionally with high-quality art and casing.
- T-shirts and Blu-Rays have up-front costs, not just costs-per-item, so you end up spending quite a bit more for each if you have fewer in total
- Fulfilling rewards takes time. Time is money.
It all adds up, extremely quickly.
ugh
why does everyone think the only costs for making things is the equipment? people need to be paid for their time
would you be ok if your jobs just stopped paying you because, you know, you COULD do your job for free
edit: if there's one thing kickstarter has done is show how fucking out of touch with reality so many people are. that, or just that there's a lot of 14 year old kids on neogaf
why does everyone think the only costs for making things is the equipment? people need to be paid for their time
would you be ok if your jobs just stopped paying you because, you know, you COULD do your job for free
edit: if there's one thing kickstarter has done is show how fucking out of touch with reality so many people are. that, or just that there's a lot of 14 year old kids on neogaf
firehawk12
Subete no aware
I wonder if the 1up brand just doesn't mean as much these days anymore, since Matt was basically on all the 1up-spinoff podcasts that he could get on to try to promote the show.
Kabuki Quantum Lover
Member
People have moved on. 1Up hasn't been relevant for years. Nostalgia and best-ofs is what keeps the name from disappearing entirely.
Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
I don't see this as a 1up nostalgia grab. The 1Up Show and Co-Op were great, but they were the same kind of thing we can have now through Giant Bomb or any number of YouTube vids or Twitch streams: intelligent friends discussing games. They were better shot, and better edited, and more professional than all of the above, however. But that kind of quality isn't needed for "Bay Area friends discussing games."
That's why that content could not be produced any more to that level of quality.
People have been a bit more spot-on with comparisons to a video successor to A Life Well Wasted, or a contemporary to Indie Game, Get Lamp, etc. The Area5 guys followed a professional track and I expect we'll get a professional quality production out of this project.
I live in an age where there is an inarguable abundance of free "friends play games" content all around me. This looks to be about way more than that guys.
Kabuki Quantum Lover
Member
Then they are speaking to no one's interests as this is tracking to fail.
You'll find no comfort in articulating your point in this thread. The people backing it are so heavily invested in seeing more content from these guys, that every potential avenue that doesn't involve such large amount of money is implausible.
7DollarHagane
Banned
that may be true but I believed that this is for a single project from an already established company.
if it doesn't get funded do they not have money for rent?
I'm just saying high quality is nice but a budget is respectable too.
no, because then they will look for other work(and hopefully find it)
the point is, if this gets funded they can put all their resources into it
Imbarkus
As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
If it doesn't get funded I'm sure they just go back to getting paid similar funds for commercial work. That's why companies do commercial work.
So it's really us that misses out, on what they are offering.
This kickstarter is by no means panhandling for the company. It, like all kickstarters, is about the product, and whether or not you believe enough in the product to kick in some small amount of dough, to try and help it happen.
So it's really us that misses out, on what they are offering.
This kickstarter is by no means panhandling for the company. It, like all kickstarters, is about the product, and whether or not you believe enough in the product to kick in some small amount of dough, to try and help it happen.
chrominance
Member
This keeps coming up, and I never bothered to dig up the link until now but hell, why not.
This is the Rebel.fm podcast where Matt Chandronait goes into detail about why Co-op (aka rebirth of the 1UP Show) failed financially. The Area5 guys have generally been quite open about the resources (money, time and effort) required to keep their business operating. Starts 97 minutes in.
Because there probably won't be a lot of people who will bother to listen to the clip (I know, I know, Arthur--but he doesn't do much talking during this stretch), here's the summary. An aside about the death of Co-op: when Area5 signed their contract with Revision3 to make Co-op, they didn't ask for a minimum payment, just a cut of advertising revenue. Matt says he (as the bizdev guy) made a mistake in not asking for that minimum. Now he's older and wiser etc. etc., but you could use this point against Area5 if you were feeling especially critical.
"What would it take to get Co-op running again?" was the initial question. Matt pegs the cost of a successful Kickstarter to do Co-op again at $600,000. Here's the breakdown
- Amazon takes a 30% cut.
- Salaries for the four principals need to be paid. "Right now we're actually paying ourselves a lot less than you need to live in San Francisco and we kind of make up for it in other ways."
- They also need an editorial staff + associated salaries, because they can't play all the games they do AND do video production at the same time. Aside: if you look at the 1UP Show this makes sense--any given episode of three game reviews required something like 8-12 people who had all played one of the three games.
- Matt estimates four editorial staff, and average salary of $60k for everyone. So for a year of Co-op, that's $480,000. You're already $60k over the Kickstarter take of $600k minus 30%.
- Office expenses would have to be $3k/month for rent, utilities, technology, etc.
- No health plans, or paid for largely from each employee's salary directly (i.e. against that $60k, though I'm inferring here).
- That's to operate for one year; at the end of the year they'd have to put up another Kickstarter to cover the next year's expenses. And assuming they spent all their time making Co-op (which, from other stories about 1UP Show production, seems totally plausible), they wouldn't be spending time doing the one-off projects for Capcom/Naughty Dog/etc., which is their core business right now.
- No bizdev people (besides Matt I suppose) or ad salespeople included in all this.
- No travel expenses included either.
Basically, what you want (and really, what I want, I loved the 1UP Show!) isn't financially feasible unless you rely on a lot of volunteer or contractor effort to handle things like reviewing and writing scripts (however vague) about games, or you want a lower-quality project done by someone who isn't Area5, whose whole schtick is professional-quality video content about games.
No offense to anyone involve in that, but 60k for reviewing games is ridiculous. All you listed came off as the inability to adapt to a changing economy. Nothing stops them from just continuing subscription based and working from there if it's such a passion project.
I'm going out on a limb that some of those cost would go down drastically if they were located outside of San Francisco. Caviar dreams..
Kabuki Quantum Lover
Member
People liked the 1Up part of the 1Up Show, not necessarily the show. The personalities are what made the show. That's why the audio podcasts were so damn popular.
chrominance
Member
They work in the games industry, which guess what? Is based largely in San Francisco. So you're basically asking them to sacrifice their core business (which IS keeping them alive) to lower costs enough to do the passion project that they've already acknowledged may not pay the bills anyway.
I mean, at some point, you have to ask why it is that no one else has bothered to do this sort of thing, if it's really so cheap and easy to do. Certainly there are lots of people who love video games and surely some of them have video production talent, why aren't they starting their own Outerlands?
dont even bother anymore. you're not getting through to them
i need to unsubscribe from this thread, i cant fucking take it anymore
Apparently because the market for it is pretty limited unfortunately.
You pretty much chopped up my argument in the worst ways. I'm not saying up and leave the state, but I don't believe I'm in the wrong in saying that San Fran is a notoriously expensive place. Move to somewhere affordable near by.
I can ask you a similar question about gaming magazines. If the market dictates it's financially unfeasible, you either compromise your inflated budget to accommodate your niche market, or you cease to exist.
I can understand your devotion to the product they produce, but you're paying four guys light bills so they can tell you that video games are neat.
chrominance
Member
Not sure if I understand your stance, then. I don't actually know where the four guys live, but I don't think they live in San Francisco proper, but more likely the outlying areas that are more affordable. But the Bay Area in general is an expensive place to live, and a lot of game publishers and developers have set up shop there. Could they run Area5 somewhere else in California? Maybe, I couldn't speak to that. I don't run their business. But their business IS based in the Bay Area, and I'm not sure it's feasible to ask them to move their business just for this project. Would they do it anyways just to reduce their overhead costs while doing things like the Street Fighter doc for clients? Again, I don't know. I imagine there's at least some on-site work involved for shooting interviews and whatnot, so there would be an advantage to remaining in the Bay Area versus moving elsewhere. It's the same reason why lots of gaming mags and websites are based near or in San Francisco.
And yeah, they can easily cut down their product. They could, for example, decide not to commit to putting out the episodes full-time, but instead do it in their spare time. Then they could remove the costs of their salaries from the budget. That doesn't seem particularly fair, given that we don't generally ask, say, Double Fine or OculusVR to produce anything in their spare time while keeping their main business going, but that's an option available to them. Forget about releases on a reasonable schedule, though. They could decide to cut their travel budget, since that's a pretty big cost center. But that directly impacts the stories they can pursue (doubly so if they also have to move their production offices out of the Bay Area, in the hypothetical scenario).
They could cut down on the quality of their production. But we're not just talking fancy cameras and computers (which, frankly, they already own and are probably counting as a cost only in terms of depreciation--though to be fair, we don't know). We're talking things like reduced setup time and resources--maybe you bring fewer people to shoots, though you need at least one person running camera and one person running sound, plus one of those people need to be the interviewer, and also who sets up lighting and power and stuff? We're talking fewer resources poured into editing the video and audio, which you definitely want unless you're okay watching hours of raw footage (spoiler: most people aren't). We're talking fewer stories and shorter episodes. Which, actually, might be totally acceptable to a lot of people, who knows?
In theory, you could run the whole thing as a super guerrilla production: one person with a camcorder/SLR and a Zoom H4n interviewing people and shooting B-roll outside of their dayjob that actually pays the bill. I think HipHopGamer does stuff like this and he's likely not alone. It's doable, maybe, just like there are people who make indie games in their bedroom without much expectation of a huge return. That's just not what that project is. If you DO find that project as a Kickstarter, it would probably also be worth donating to, and it could even be good. But it would very likely be much smaller in scope.
At the end of the day, though, you're right. I AM paying for four guys' lighting bills so they can tell me video games are neat. I decided that was worth the cost, and it sounds like you've decided it's not. We're both right! It's a personal decision at the end of the day. I just don't think that the idea that their budgets are grossly inflated really makes sense. If you don't think it's worth $200k, that's a perfectly valid opinion. But I don't think they're being ridiculous in their budgeting. That's all I was trying to get across.
May not be obvious from my username unless you were around in The 1UP Show days, but this is Matt Chandronait, part of AREA 5. I'm up to my eyeballs in managing the Kickstarter, of course, so I apologize that I don't have time to go back and read the whole thread, but it makes perfect sense to me that there would be questions about the budget. If you've got something you'd like to know, (budget or otherwise)--reply back! I may not be able to respond right away, but the whole beauty about this Internet Forums thing I keep hearing about is that even if I don't have time to reply until the meager depths of night we can still have a discussion. Hooray modernity!