Hey all,
I saw the amount of attention this post was getting and so thought I should respond. Let me take things in parts since it's a large post.
I love the idea of CoE and backed it on Kickstarter for a decent amount, but after REALLY studying it I'm now convinced that it is another project that is not ready for crowd funding and the developers are not being fully transparent.
Noted. Here's the thing. Funding in most startups happens in phases. There's the "idea phase", "friends and family phase", "seed phase", and then the various series... series A, series B. etc. In each phase there's an expectation that deliverables will come from the investment money. In the Idea Phase and Friends and Family, the output is generally conceptual documents, illustrations, theoretical calculations, prototypes, etc. It's enough to approach the seed round (which is generally angel investors) with enough information that investors can look at what's provided and go "Yep. I can see how this would work. I'd be willing to invest in it."
In our case, as with many other game companies recently, we've gone the route of crowdfunding for our seed funding. However, we also put a significant amount of our personal money into the "idea phase", so that we'd approach the seed round with significantly more evidence than most MMORPGs have come to the seed round with. We've got hundreds of models, dozens of animations, a working combat demo, videos of systems we're working on, etc... All of which is more than most other MMOs have come to crowdfunding with. So are we ready for crowdfunding/seed round? Yes.
As for us being fully transparent, I'm not sure what we've not be transparent about.
The screenshots on their website are staged. There is even a robot in one of them. http://chroniclesofelyria.com/media#image-15
It's not staged. We showed video of us running around on that map to dozens of people. Also, the very fact it has a robot on the map should be evidence that it's not staged. That was taken by one of our artists who didn't have the character model. He took the screenshot with the built-in UE character actor. But, in case you don't believe me, here ya go.
Walking Video
I also see a lot of purchasable assets in many of the screenshots.
Yes. It's how we're able to get so much done in such a short period of time. With only two character artists and one environment artist, it's unreasonable to assume we could produce the same volume as a larger team. But this isn't a bad thing. It's an example of things we're doing to ensure we deliver on time, and within budget. We don't waste time making assets when there are already high-quality versions available on the web for use. We instead focus our resources on areas that are specific to CoE, or when there aren't adequate versions available. Things like our Canis Rabbit, our Trison, and Ursaphant. Things like our armor and clothing. Do we buy furniture and material packs? Sure.
It is logical to assume if you have so much developed that you can produce the number and quality of screenshots they have, you would have at least a few videos, especially when you're asking for almost a million dollars.
We have videos on YouTube. We've also got near 20 hours of video recorded of us walking around in the world. The thing is, it isn't interesting yet. Because we've got a limited number of hair/clothing models, and the female is modeled but not animated, there's no NPCs populating the world. Could we throw in 100 copies of the same male? Yes. But we haven't because it doesn't serve to demonstrate anything beyond the fact the world exists.
There is mention of "investors" waiting in the wings. I've seen this before and in one case it turned out to be a complete lie and was only used to build confidence in their audience. I'm not implying SBS is lying but more details about this investment offer should be made available.
You actually are implying that we're lying. The investor (not plural), is a friend of the family and has agreed to put up the other $0.5M in friends/family funding once the KS is successful. That's it. There's no other investors. We haven't claimed there are. If you read somewhere that there were other investors lined up, then you (or the source) misinterpreted something. We're in seed round, not series A. That'll come later.
They don't need to name names but if I were donating I would want to know if the investors were going to become partners, have a say at their board meetings, what capacity they will serve SBS and so on.
They will become shareholders. They are silent partners.
The stated timeline of end of 2017 for FULL RELASE is not a realistic one. Not even close.
Noted. I'm curious, however, what you're basing that on? Is it based on your development experience? Your insider knowledge into what business deals we've been working on? Have you peeked at our Gantt chart? Maybe you feel like using purchased assets from the Unreal Marketplace won't speed up development? Could it be you know that our choice of programming language for the server will slow down development? Anything? You got anything to substantiate your claim?
Here's the thing. You complain about us being transparent, but it's easy to sit where you are and say we're not going to make it. If you're wrong, great. You were wrong, and you get the game on-time. If you're right, then nobody is going to be hurt more by it than us. Either way, you're sitting in a nice comfortable spot. Recognize it's easy to make statements from the comfort of your position.
They also have a lot more money to put towards their development and have industry veterans at the helm.
We will be raising more money. And we also have industry veterans at the helm. More than that though, we've got people who've worked in and outside of the industry. We've learned some things about good software development while not in the industry.
I just read in another thread by a fan how SBS is saving time by not having to code thousands of quests and the land is procedurally generated. That procedural generation still has to be coded to the specifics of their design document. Do you think the Soulbound engine they are building will be trivial? From what I've read, that alone could take many man months just to get it to its first iteration.
You are not wrong. But engineering months are different than content months. Higher initial cost, for lower long-term cost.
"Costs include the purchase of art assets, engineering fees, development tools, game engine licensing, server hardware, and marketing fees." Nowhere in there do I see costs for salaries but in their video we see them all in the same, barely decorated office. Is Jeromy and Eddie actually paying salaries?
At the time that was written, we in fact had only one contractor. Engineering fees were the cost for our single Engineer at the time. He was the only "fee" being paid. Now I pay 15 salaries. The reason the room is barely decorated is because we spend our money on salaries, not decorations.
I could be wrong but I suspect they were all flown to a location specifically to record the video and make it look like they work next to each other.
You are definitely wrong. Myself, Nathan, Eddie, Van, Brandon, Mark, Jason, Lindsey, and Miguel all work on-site, in the poorly decorated office. Where we collaborate, work late, and have NERF wars. The only people flown in where Dean and Heather. They were flown in because it was the week of our PAX demo, and we wanted our engineer on site to help with last-minute PAX stuff. And Heather was on-site both for PAX as well, as part of the outreach team, to help with the Kickstarter.
How was the $500K self-funding spent? Again, no videos that I could find.
You didn't look very hard. CoE on YouTube
As for where the money went, try the building you don't believe we lease, or the 15 employees you don't believe we pay. Or the mocap software, Maya licenses, MSDN licenses, Adobe CC licenses, the store-bought assets you criticized us for buying.
My last concern is that the numbers don't add up. SBS asked for $900K and said that would get them to full release in 2017
We've repeatedly said that's not the case. We've said $900k is all we need from Kickstarter. We have every intention of going for a Series A round of funding in the spring, and will use the next round of funding to get the game out the door. The seed round of funding, is, as stated, to get to a fully working game that can be shown to VCs.
They have 16 team members. Clearly they will be able to pay concept artists and even enviro modelers a smaller wage, but animators and character modelers come with a decent price tag.
Do you know what that price tag is? Because I do. I also know that we offer the team members stock options/equity in exchange for working on the lower end of the salary range. It encourages them do to their best work because they have a stake in the company, and it lowers our out-of-pocket, up-front costs.
Add in server and bandwidth costs during testing, marketing budgets to push the launch, licensing and upgrade fees, tradeshow expenses, employee turn-over and every other bump they will hit and it all adds up to 18 months is not long enough for all they need to develop, but they won't have enough money to last more than 18 months if even that long.
You are correct. This is the difference between the seed round and the series A. The seed round gets us to Alpha/feature complete, but to get into Beta and beyond requires a Series A.
I've lost thousands on projects like this because I fall into the hype only to see them end up locking their doors or getting a product that was nothing like what was promised.
As a last bit of advice, you may consider that a large percentage of a studios' time is spent answering unsubstantiated threads like this instead of working on the game itself. Literally, the 30 minutes I spent answering this thread was time not spent doing more important things. But when the community "demands a response," what choice do we have? If it were up to us, there would be less pointless accusations designed solely to insight controversy, so that we could spend the time developing the game.
