What Did RG Think Shroud Was Going To Cost?

They kept getting money, so they kept adding features.

 

Bug #154762 submitted and cleared. Thanks for your most fastidious feedback!

 

Personally I knew the Kickstarter wasn't going to cover everything. They said from the beginning that Richard was investing millions and will certainly invest more before it ships.

Spoiler: Kickstarter FAQ's

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/faqs

Look at FAQ #2 "Why do you need my money". Ok, I thought it was clear

There are benefits which we're beginning to reap. Taking risks happens every day. This was one I took. So far it's looking great. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm looking over the next 15-20 years where we will be. I don't see a problem

 

Still can't find the page/link that had all the costs and expenditures broken down, but I did find this. Interesting read on the company especially risk factor assessments and costs.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1522456/000152245618000001/portalariumformcar.pdf

 

Even though Kickstarter says the funding goal should be the minimum you need to complete the project and fulfill rewards, I think it's pretty obvious that many video game projects use it to get their projects off the ground. SotA is no different from a lot of other projects in that regard really. How individuals feel about that is down to them.

On the other hand, I think the heavy levels of monetization, and other ongoing attempts to keep money coming in (seed invest, telethons, selling blood and hair (lol), possible second Kickstarter) caught some of us by surprise.

 

Interesting that website estimates Tabula Rasa at $100 million and RG led the project and estimates it at around $15-$20 million.

Edit: Its because that article made an obvious error. Tabula Rasa didn't cost $100 million. It cost 100 million won, the currency in South Korea. The exchange rate of USD to KRW on the date the original sourced article was released was $1 to 945.3 won, which puts the cost at closer to $10 million.

 

That was from the stream two (?) weeks ago? I think they also just before that said that Travian was in charge of the marketing. They apparently didn't notice what wasn't happening because someone else was responsible for marketing while they were busy working on the game.

Many people have made suggestions about what they think can make the game better. But no amount of changing things in the game will fix people not even knowing that you exist. And I recall that Starr also said there was still an above expected "attach rate" for the trial, so, ya know, maybe it's not so much the game's fault that nobody is playing.

 

Just wanted to make another note about the combat, that a complete overhaul has been obviously necessary for years now. The deck+decay system was never something that should've been seriously considered, let alone programmed and put into a video game "launching" in 2018. There are two universal complaints about this game, the UI and the Combat. Honestly, we can forget the first one.

The combat is, and always has been bad. There have been dissertations written on these forums regarding the sheer number of players that will not even consider touching this game because it's tab target, ability spam garbage with zero depth, horrendous balancing issues, and VERY slow iterations.

There's no point really arguing about anything else. The money spent. Features promised. Etc. None of this matters.

This game needs a combat overhaul, and it needed it over two years ago. If this isn't done, there's no point doing anything else - nobody will play this game.

This is far from the first time this has been suggested, but it's worth noting here. This is where whatever funds are left should focus, if indeed there are any left.

Honestly, Developers, is a combat overhaul being worked on by essentially everyone left at this company? Because if the answer is anything other than, "Absolutely, and what we've got will be available for testing soon!" you might as well turn out the lights and cut your losses.

 

That's not what has been announced initially.

Maybe I'm wrong, but Travian's job was not to do all the marketing all over the world but only for Europe, Central and South America and a part of Africa. It was not up to Travian to take care of the marketing in North America.

And it would probably be in contradiction with the seedinvest announcement :

And that's rather logical. Even if the marketing is done by a third party, it was up to Portalarium to coordinate the efforts. I would be very surprised if a businessman like @Lord British don't know that.

And at last, but not least, we know that Travian was not able to publish its website after the legitimate community's rant about the many problems we had with store credits, reward submissions, etc... And after that Portalarium postponed everything. How Travian was supposed to take care of the marketing without even the website they invested in ?

Now, where is @Lord British ? On the standup corner, there are days when he is not mentioned (and when he is, we don't have much informations except that he is leading some meeting or posting Jiras). On those forums, his presence is sporadic (332 messages, including some very short posts). He is not even physically in the studios. But on twitter, you can see him very active outside of Shroud..

All this leaves me pensive...

Maybe.

Let's do some maths, will you ?

Each month, the telethons/livestream brought new funds for the game. During several last telethons, the average income was $90 000, approximatively. If we take the most optimistic estimates, everyone will only pay $5 : that's 18 000 players. Now, let's be foolish ! Let's say that only 33% pay the $5 monthly, we now have 54 000 players ! But... That's already less than the 60 000 accounts which were registered on the website, one year ago (and who obviously were aware of Shroud existence), while the game has been listed on Steam for years.

Now, consider the fact that 15 player owned towns were upgraded, including 13 municipalities (each municipality costs, at least, $1000 with the discount, except if you upgraded from a non discounted Metropolis, which is very unlikely), and now we have only 15 413 players paying.

Let's add to that that @Lord British himself said to Eurogamers that the total active players involves many thousands players and NOT many tens of thousands. Then, we can assume that most people just pay more than $5, and that, in reality, almost all players who play the game also are financially supporting the telethons/livestream.

Now, let's be serious : Let's guess that the average spending is $20 per month for each player (taking account of the biggest sales, multi-accounts, etc...). That means that, out of 60 000 accounts, we only have 4 500 donators and hardly more active players. Our retention rate is less than 10%.

Of course, if Shroud was attracting millions of players, that rate would certainly be enough. That's what some MMOs out there can perform as a retention rate. But the thing here is that Shroud is an "indie" game. It means that this game had to get a public quickly and keep it, in order to build a good reputation and start a virtuous circle. Because even without marketing, there is word of mouth (look at Star Citizen if you are skeptical about that ; you know ? the game with hundreds of thousands of donatorswhich made a cross-promotion with Shroud -vanduul polearm and crossbow-). Now, we are NOT in a virtuous circle. Why ? Maybe because of the game itself, maybe not. Personaly, I will never say that the game is bad ; but personaly, I think that it's not good enough. Too much bad strategic choices have been made, in my opinion.

Take the "seducing Ultima fans" strategy, for exemple. Ultima fans have a wide variety of tastes (UO vs solo games as an exemple) and most are mature players. If the only strategy is to try to seduce these fans, it's a waste of time if you don't build a MMO with good story telling and no fedex quests. Now, there are other generations of players emerging today, and for who the nostalgia will not work and your strategy don't even take those in account... while those people actually prefer "action MMORPGs", which Shroud is NOT.

 

I still don't get the meaning of this thread? Why is it important to know, what Richard's first estimate for the SOTA costs were?

 

Because every project has to be built with an healthy financial plan in mind.
That's what allow companies to avoid bankruptcy. That's what allow a CEO to evaluate what can be done/promised or not to the customers (before the marketing department embellishes the whole thing of course). That would have allowed people to predict that Shroud (with $14M cost instead of $5M) could never been delivered in 2014, as an exemple.

 

That's true, but without any insight into the financial accounting of the company, this thread is based on assumptions/speculations etc.. -in other words: worthless and meaningless.

 

The financial accounting of the company has been published on seedinvest one year ago. The informations we still don't have (active player count) stay unknown because Portalarium decided not to publish those. For those things, people only try to guess, based on facts and reported statements.

 

They have made public, as required by law, the company's 2015, 2016, and 2017 financial statements.

 

And ? Has anyone read those, posting in this thread ?

 

Yes. They were linked too on page 2....

 

@Black777Lodge The point of the thread is pretty straightforward, and mentioned in the OP.

It is to settle recurring debates about whether or not the KS was intended to wholly fund the game.

Might look a little "out of the blue" since the last thread I was discussing this topic in got locked because... Reasons.

There really isn't much to discuss here, but it's fun to see a few people desperately trying to stick to their pet narratives, despite being presented with plain unadulterated facts to the contrary.

To your last question, yes I read their financial statements before making a contribution through SeedInvest. It's how I originally estimated their burn rate.

I'll be the first to admit it appears I've made some bad investments here. But then again, I did so understanding the risks and with money that I knew I could afford to lose, and probably would.

My attitude was... Well I could go to the casino, but this game looks like it could be more fun.

 

I just had an image of the all the older folks I see at Vegas grinding UT for hours

 

Money raised during the Kickstarter was never intended to fully fund even Episode 1 alone.
"If you ask for too much money up front because of the rules of Kickstarter, it’s very,
very hard to ask for the complete development budget." - Molyneux

 

Well now that's just hurtful I replied to you with nothing but respect for your talking points showing where you might be wrong.

I could say the same thing, that you are sticking desperately to the narrative that the kickstarter was clear about not being meant to fund the whole episode, despite being presented with plain unadulterated facts to the contrary in my reply to you (and some others).

It seems like you didn't really want to discuss this topic. But rather that you just wanted to state your OP and then move on. That's totally fine! I do it myself often enough! But at least just say so at the start rather than letting people reply to you and then rather rudely dismissing them.

Just my opinion anyways....