http://kotaku.com/5977246/were-hear...s-days-after-launch-of-11-million-kickstarter Ouch, so it sounds like they are down to just a handful of people. My condolences to those who got hit.
Well better to have this happen, than the 38 studios fiasco of employees working for weeks and then not getting paid. Pretty crazy their bottom line is this tight though, guess that Microsoft AOEO money burned up fast. I hope Wildman gets funded, it looks like it would be something I'd really enjoy playing.
Yeah, I can't imagine this will help their kickstarter at all. And ouch I found this video painful to watch.
Chris Taylor updates the status of the Wildman Kickstarter project after the layoffs at Gas Powered Games
I dont feel that "pledge or the company gets it" blackmail approach to kickstarter is going to prove successful. Kickstarter should be "there is this really cool project we want to do, that is a bit different/riskier/out there than the stuff we usually do - so we are launching this kickstarter to see if enough people will back this different vision to make it happen". Not "we need rent next week".
Beyond a means to bring in funds, Kickstarter should be whatever the project leads and their backers want it to be.
Sure, but I think the number of backers under a "pledge now or little timmy gets it in the neck" model will be small. Not me at least.
But everyone is already laid off. So aren't they all out looking for other jobs? They're not just home eating crackers and watching Adventure Time while occasionally refreshing the Kickstarter page. So even if the Kickstarter is successful, the chances of reassembling the team to make the proposed game are not exactly good, in that, if they're good people, they'll get jobs right away. So you're going to lose your leads and your best and your brightest, and you're going to have to hire/train/incorporate into the team a bunch of new people. That costs time, and time is burning through your Kickstarter funds. While I feel for GPG, I'm not confident that even if they successfully fund, they'll actually deliver. Again, not because they're screw ups or they're bad people, but because of the simple logistics of what happens after a layoff. Does this mean Steve Bauman is out there? Silver lining: maybe he'll go back into journalism. Then again, I wouldn't wish that on him with the state of that industry. Well, I hope everyone lands somewhere awesome.
As Dean said, the people are _already_ laid off. No one is being held hostage. Whether or not this is a successful Kickstarter campaign aside, wanting to insure your employees get severance and PTO paid out is a good thing.
I always felt that Steve and Jeff Green's passion was with (game) writing more than game designing and was sad to see both Computer Games and CGW (er, GFW) shuttered. Your post made me look for Steve's personal blog, which I vaguely remembered as including the phrase 'my life is a patio of fun' (it's http://blog.manic-pop-thrills.com/ and he updates even less than I do on mine). Before tracking down his site I landed on his LinkedIn profile where he sums up his work on CGM thusly: "I typed a lot of words into documents that were printed and delivered to people, who ignored the words and told me I sucked." I'd be quite pleased if he found BF. And none of this is particularly on-topic. Sorry!
So, the actual content of the video update is "everybody got laid off. Vote in the comments whether I should just shut down the Kickstarter." In case you didn't know. Oh yeah, and he mentions in the video that he won't necessarily even be able to rehire people from the team, since they may already have jobs or etc.
Yeah, I don't see this as a "blackmail" kickstarter at all - I think he was getting overcome with emotion several times during the video. He's pretty much warning folks that it's a caveat emptor at this point, but I feel that he's being genuine and upfront about it. He's in a tough spot but I think paying his folks and letting them go, certainly the option that has the most risk for his company and by extension himself recovering, instead of gambling their fate on a kickstarter campaign was the upright thing to do. How often do the egos of folks running companies with their "I cannot possibly fail" attitudes end up hurting the little guys?
A $1.1M kickstarter, under any circumstances, doesn't cover 40 full-time people. That's not even three months of funding.
So if GPG fails to deliver on Wildman because it runs out money, will its backers have any sympathy when they ask for their money back? This is an interesting case for crowdfunding, because the company is incredibly likely to go out of business if the Kickstarter isn't successful, but it's arguable that GPG is in a position to deliver what they are promising because they don't a lot of cash resources to do it. As pointed out, even if they get their target, it's not a huge amount of money to keep going. So it seems like a bad idea to back this to me, but maybe the sympathy vote will get it over the line.
From the Qt3 thread on the same topic: (Full post here) Good luck to Steve & the rest of the folks who lost their jobs. I too wish he'd be able to return to journalism, although that industry seems to continue its death rattle as well. Then again, I read that house flipping is coming back, so who knows.
It feels like they had kind of an unrealistic expectation - many, if not most, kickstarters have a quick burst of funding at the beginning, then a long period of doldrums, and then a huge burst of activity again, at the end. Did they really expect to get all, or most, of the 1.1 million in the first few days? Either way, I'm very sad to see the situation that a great developer and several acquaintances are now in, and I very much hope they end up getting that huge burst of interest towards the end of the Kickstarter, and are able to fire things back up. As a side note, does someone want to let Steve know that most of the QT3 folks he's familiar with have moved to BrokenForum? It would be great to have him around.
Well, I kicked in. Seems like a good cause and the game they're proposing actually sounds up my alley and different from anything else out there. I do think there's a market for a game with MOBA stylings that doesn't require being on a team with random people fighting other random people.
I also really liked the last MOBA they did. Demigod was a solid design--the best game that Taylor has done since Total Annihilation, IMHO. I'd love to see him explore that concept further, but things are looking pretty grim. :(
Agreed. The Demigod ai was wretched but it had some really interesting mechanics. You can really tell Taylor is agonizing all of this from the last update. I hate it for the GPG people.
On top of the suckage is that people can withdraw existing kickstarter pledges, which I wouldn't be surprised by with the recent news.
We'll see what happens when it gets closer to the deadline, but three days after Chris Taylor posted that video update the total pledged has not risen much.
I was actually thinking of doing this because that gameplay prototype video was absolutely wretched. Now I feel like I'm putting a gun to GPG's head by doing so. Fucking hell.
Of course not. Who in the hell would be dumb enough to invest even $15 in a company which basically just laid off all of their employees. I say no way it will hit its goal. Fortunately no one will lose any money.
Saw this over on 'that other place', but figured it would be worth sharing here. It's an interview with Chris Taylor shortly after this whole debacle. It's interesting that he's never gotten royalties. I've gotten royalties, but it can be a fairly rare thing. One company, we had to threaten to sue our publisher to get them.
Currently the Wildman Kickstarter project is at $343,963 out of the $1,100,000 goal with 17 days to go. Perhaps they set the goal too high?
From the sounds of it, it's one of those things where they couldn't set the goal any lower, as they would be a 15 man studio and even then they would be at reduced pay and Chris himself would've had zero salary.
I don't think any of their games sold a "shit" ton. I feel like the first party developer probably get nice royalties..everyone else just get nothing unless you make a game that sell like cocaine.
http://www.pcgamesn.com/indie/wildman-bay-inside-chris-taylors-fight-save-gas-powered-games I can't stop reading these. I'm not enjoying it, so it's not schadenfreude, it's more like being unable to take your eyes off of a scene of an accident. Re idris_z: I agree, by my definition, they've always been more AA than AAA. (The project I got royalties for, we were not first party, it sold well, I have no idea how many units would be designated cocaine levels, but I guess it did?)
I don't understand how their games could have cost so much money. SC1 never looked like a $11 million game to me. I'm also annoyed by the suggestion that Obsidian was just trading on nostalgia. They did do that, but they also had a very specific and detailed proposal that demonstrated they weren't just airing vague ideas about a game. The latter is excatly the impression I got from GPG's Kickstarter.
Yeah. Obsidian was obviously trading on nostalgia, but they had a specific idea for a specific type of game that there is a lot of actual demand for. Wildman basically has none of those things, so Taylor can use the nostalgia scapegoat to make himself feel better, but it isn't a lack of tapping into people's nostalgia reserves that will make the project a failure.
Yeah, I don't think Wildman was a good choice for a kickstarter concept, and I think they probably should've done a clone of their existing popular franchise for the nostalgia factor. "Complete Decimation" or "Perfect Admiral", and not just for the nostalgia factor, but because those are things their engine can already do, they don't have to try to work out melee combat or whatever, they can just concentrate on making the game good and refining it. (Or try to make a F2P version of it, but they didn't really have the money for it)
SC1 had some pretty nifty tech, with that huge number of units, multiple display support and actual ballistic modelling, it was a pretty big game. This is just a guess though, I don't have actual data on where their costs came from. I hope they make it, and I'll pledge to the project, because of how much I liked their previous strategy games. I love Supcom 2, it's one of the best coop comp-stomping RTSs, and they did a great job cutting feature creep from the first and turning it into a more elegant design. I also like the fact that they're willing to innovate with tech like in Supcom. Their Kings & Castles dev videos showed some promising new formation mechanics, it was a shame to see that put on hold. I very much enjoy the art in their games too. I got Demigod too late and couldn't find many games, but in the skirmish games I tried the units looked amazing. Same thing for the units in Supcom 2, every time I play it I have to stop and marvel at my Monoliths.
They already had ballistic modeling in Total Annihilation, though they might've improved it for the SupComs. I could never get into the art of GPG. Demigod was probably their most compelling, but the rest always felt really generic to me.
I watched the whole interview, I get the feeling that he is very grateful to MS. I totally agree with him regarding "lifting the skirt" for publisher, and getting lowballed by publisher due to delaying tactics, though I wonder what was his opinion on demigod and working with Stardock..
