Does anyone have a link to the stream where they talk about their budget? I'm having trouble convincing some people that it's reasonable. I'm sure this kind of ignorance is frustrating for Lab Zero.
Eh, Mike's "rant" is informative, but a lot of people don't know how to process his tone. And think he's attacking other crowdfunding campaigns when he's just trying to communicate his frustration with a lot of the assumptions people make based on other campaigns.
Anyway, our budget is based on the industry "back of the napkin" math of $10,000/man-month. That doesn't mean everyone makes $120k a year, because it also covers rent, utilities, internet, benefits, equipment, legal costs, etc. - basically the total cost of employing someone from salary to overhead.
The average burn rate for professional developers, BTW, is now creeping closer to $15k/man-month, and some studios go into the $20k-25k range. So while I understand that this probably sounds like a lot of money to people, we're still actually on the low end of game budgets.
We estimate that we need to grow the studio to around 18 people, and the total project is estimated to take 2 years. The only reason we can get it as low as $3.5M is because for the first 6-9 months we'll be doing pre-production, making tools, replacing the UI code, etc. with mostly the current staff before we ramp up hiring. If we didn't account for staffing up, pre-production, etc. that would put the total budget at over $4.3M.
On top of that, none of the core staff are going to be paid industry average salaries for our roles or experience. They're real salaries, but on the low end of things, especially for how hard we work and our experience. But we also need to be able to support competitive salaries for the new hires.
For example, my salary will be about what I should be making as a designer with 5 or more years of experience. But I'm the CEO, and have 15 years of industry experience.
I mean, I would also point out the fact that we have a publisher?
Publishers are
not exactly known for being generous when it comes to game budgets, and they think this budget is a reasonable one for the game we're trying to make. 505 has been great, but there's no reason they would pay more, like... just because?
I mean, I know this is the internet and everyone thinks they know everything, but... really. If any gamer thinks they know more about game budgeting than an actual publisher, I don't really know what to tell them.
...Well, except that they don't, of course.
Will probably throw money at it anyway because it just screams quality and deserves to be made.
