Sort of, but only for relatively small amounts of money, to try to avoid the kinds of outrage-producing stories of grandma losing her life savings to a snake-oil investment that led to the regulations in the first place.
Regulation Crowdfunding, passed by Congress in 2016, added an exception to the 1933 ban on selling unregistered securities to the general public. Companies may now do so, but with two limits. The company may raise no more than $5m total in a 12-month period through this route. And individual investors are limited to investing no more than 5-10% of their income or net worth, across all crowdfunded companies they invest in, also in a 12-month period (5% for lower incomes and net worths, and 10% for higher). The details on the 5-10% of income or net worth formula are here: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
Like it or not, but Star Citizen delivered exactly what majority of whales who donated millions into it wanted: spaceship garage simulator. Some people were happy to pay for their space ship "NFTs".
Ha! I very much doubt it delivered what they wanted, but they're prepared to pretend it's what they wanted because the alternative is to cry over how much money they wasted.
At this point, SC is a giant exercise in sunk cost fallacy for the whales. There are so many people who have sunk thousands, tens of thousands for some, in stuff that still only exists as jpeg or text blurb a decade later.
The core game they're building is not too bad, it's just not even reaching 1% of the promises, and they SOLD those promises.
I'm not betting on whether or not it will be a good game in the end (for many what it offers is already enough to have loads of fun), but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind they won't ever reach 50% of sold features developed, because it's impossible. I've been in enough project to recognize massive feature creep and the need for a proper reset, and SC passed that years ago, now they're in the "you better not release because you're fine as long as it's in dev, but once released the chicken will come home to roost".
Another big issue is that, even if they somehow did it all, reached 100% completion, they're sold so much advantage left and right that the game would HAVE to be pay to win. It's already pay to win by design before even existing in its final form.
I don't have any right to tell people how to spend their money or what they should enjoy, and I have paid my fair share of "overpriced" stuff I enjoyed, but my main issue is that I was really into the idea of another AA/AAA single player story-driven space game and Squadron 42 seems further away today than ten or five years ago.
I don't think SC has delivered on $50m (or whatever absurd figure they have now reached) worth of value. However, "SC is a scam" meme hails from years ago and the game has been under continuous development since then.
There are now viable and enjoyable gameplay loops. You can do all the things with spaceships. The absurd level of scale has been delivered. But, the game is a mile deep and an inch wide (the exact opposite problem to Elite Dangerous) - there is very little content. It's also a buggy mess.
I am also somewhat upset with my purchase - in the intervening years I have grown to have less time, and the gameplay is too realistic/hardcore for a casual. I probably won't be playing it.
Regardless, your stance on the game is problematic from a factual standpoint: 2 minutes in the game would prove you wrong to anybody - a result that can be replicated a couple of times each year for free.
To be fair, I don't exactly think it's a scam (or at least, I certainly don't think it _started_ as a scam) but has just been horribly mismanaged to the point where I think it is now beyond saving.
It has taken such a long time to make that the technology stack it's built on is now horribly outdated, but it's also far too big to redo in a new and more fit for purpose engine.
They should have stopped adding more features years ago and instead spent as much effort as possible to get the basics done. I honestly don't think it can be recovered at this point.
Problem is that you can't align work of art with "customer expectation" unless you funding book 9 of 10 in some series or someting like that. Your overall fantasy fans won't be able to explain what their expectations are and gamers are much much harder to satisfy...
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a truly great game. It’s interesting to discuss how that may or may not be replicated. Still, we’ve been going through years of mediocre cash grab after mediocre cash grab. So many beloved franchises have been basically ruined by monetization, and developers that either don’t care, or don’t have the freedom to care.
Knowing what gamers want isn’t hard. They want games that don’t suck. You might try to build something great, and only end up with something good. But if your only real passion is making money, then the games you make will never be “good” no matter how much money they make.
You can also try to build something great and end up with a shitty product or just go bankrupt. AAA gamedev is not just about wanting to make a good game and caring - it's all about production pipeline and management.
Larian grown to 450 people to build it and it's just internal staff. It's hard to imagine how many more people worked on localization, voice-over, QA / LQA and as countless contractors to on whatever aspects they couldn't do in-house. It can be very well be 1000+ people.
I not trying to say it's impossible to make good games, but making one at this scale it is literally like a rocket science.
The point is not about how Larian built this particular game. The thing to examine is how they were able to put themselves in the position to make this game. It was not an accident, or luck. It was at least 15 years of toil just to be the kind of company that could do this.
This meant tireless focus on the nature of making an enjoyable game. Not addiction science, not investor pandering, not holiday release cycles... fun, story, and player agency.
Yes it took them more than two decades to get there, but unfortunately it's not enough to just make good games to achieve kind of success Larian achieved.
It's really takes a lot of work on financial and investor attraction side when you making game that likely cost more than $100,000,000. Amount of bizdev talent and work required to pull it off is not that far from "making a good game" part.
Author bring crowdfunding of Divinity: Original Sin as a reason of Larian success, but truth is that ~$1,000,000 they collected is nowhere enough to make game like that. Though having this kind of investment from 20,000 fans can be enough of proof to secure 2-5x of extra funding to actually build game you promised.
Author also forgets what it takes to build fanbase of a size to even have this crowdfunding compaign. Larian was founded in 1996 and they did kickstarter for D:OS in 2013. Majority of game studios rarely live for 10 years even if they manage to release successful title.
I wont even start on the fact there been very short timeframe of Kickstarter hype. Today studio without a big name can barely get $100,000 and with current interest rate attracting extra investments is even harder because to make even very small game you need at least $200,000.
I talking from experience since I (with co-founders ofc) also trying to build game studio making original hardcore buy-to-play games. We already have not-so-indie team of 15 people, but our burnrate is laughtable compared to any VC startup.
Yet making games is extremely difficult business: you need a lot of highly skilled and motivated talent; budgets and deadlines are always insufficient; and even then making deals with publishers is hard and deal negotiation can easily take months while cash gap can easily kill you.
Building community big enough for successful crowdfunding will takes years and keeping people who give you money happy is almost impossible. Majority of developers from Kickstarter hype times failed miserably here. It's simply impossible goal to most game developers with tons of loyal fans, let alone some random SaaS startup.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is an interesting counter-example. Once again it was a team of proven industry veterans. They solicited investments, but then wiped out their investor equity with a sweetheart acquisition deal.
Haha, this was one of the projects I funded on Kickstarter. Great success. The Enhanced Edition is a fantastic game. And the second game is great too! I loved it. Can't wait to play Baldur's Gate.
The best part about this is that they're one of the few developers who are making co-op games. I really appreciate that since I can play with a friend on the couch.
I randomly (not my usual fare) watched a video by IGN on this sentiment and couldn't agree more with everything they said: https://youtu.be/iWdZhKFtxKg
> Like a lot of people, I’m deeply excited about what the lovely folks at Larian accomplished with Baldur’s Gate 3, but I want to gently, pre-emptively push back against players taking that excitement and using it to apply criticism or a “raised standard” to RPGs going forward."
This might be one of the most childish takes I have ever witnessed in the wild.
"hey, now don't expect quality, it's not like we can deliver it"
I'm not sure if this is rosey-colored nostalgia glasses, or just being jaded by the garbage that AAA studios have been putting out, but is BG3 actually raising the bar or is it returning to a bar long-forgotten?
Either way, the AAA take on Larian's success is extremely telling - especially some of the mocking/hostile takes. They aren't going to learn a damned thing.
It's a return, that's the most galling part. It's a great game, but it's not revolutionary or genre defining. The best part about bg3 is the things it's missing:
- no rmt
- doesn't require online connection
- no missing content loaded as dlc
- no apologies from the devs for pushing out an unfinished game...
After the many AAA trainwrecks this/last year, everyone should understand game development is hard and most games will likely suck. That's fair. But most games these days suck because they're actively made with anti-consumer practices as their foundation. That's not fair to consumers, and devs need to learn this lesson, because their corporate bosses won't.
You could of course argue that the "unfair advantage" is the lack of shareholders who expect the studio to squeeze every last bit of profit out of the player base, but that's neither here nor there.
Larian's "unfair advantage" is that they have spent decades creating roleplaying games while avoiding falling into many video game industry "fads". And having a market which is full of potential customers, but almost empty of competition.
42 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadHave we re-invented pre-regulated-to-death stock markets?
Regulation Crowdfunding, passed by Congress in 2016, added an exception to the 1933 ban on selling unregistered securities to the general public. Companies may now do so, but with two limits. The company may raise no more than $5m total in a 12-month period through this route. And individual investors are limited to investing no more than 5-10% of their income or net worth, across all crowdfunded companies they invest in, also in a 12-month period (5% for lower incomes and net worths, and 10% for higher). The details on the 5-10% of income or net worth formula are here: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
Then of course there's Star Citizen...
The core game they're building is not too bad, it's just not even reaching 1% of the promises, and they SOLD those promises.
I'm not betting on whether or not it will be a good game in the end (for many what it offers is already enough to have loads of fun), but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind they won't ever reach 50% of sold features developed, because it's impossible. I've been in enough project to recognize massive feature creep and the need for a proper reset, and SC passed that years ago, now they're in the "you better not release because you're fine as long as it's in dev, but once released the chicken will come home to roost".
Another big issue is that, even if they somehow did it all, reached 100% completion, they're sold so much advantage left and right that the game would HAVE to be pay to win. It's already pay to win by design before even existing in its final form.
I don't have any right to tell people how to spend their money or what they should enjoy, and I have paid my fair share of "overpriced" stuff I enjoyed, but my main issue is that I was really into the idea of another AA/AAA single player story-driven space game and Squadron 42 seems further away today than ten or five years ago.
There are now viable and enjoyable gameplay loops. You can do all the things with spaceships. The absurd level of scale has been delivered. But, the game is a mile deep and an inch wide (the exact opposite problem to Elite Dangerous) - there is very little content. It's also a buggy mess.
I am also somewhat upset with my purchase - in the intervening years I have grown to have less time, and the gameplay is too realistic/hardcore for a casual. I probably won't be playing it.
Regardless, your stance on the game is problematic from a factual standpoint: 2 minutes in the game would prove you wrong to anybody - a result that can be replicated a couple of times each year for free.
Add another 0 to that. Not even joking.
It has taken such a long time to make that the technology stack it's built on is now horribly outdated, but it's also far too big to redo in a new and more fit for purpose engine.
They should have stopped adding more features years ago and instead spent as much effort as possible to get the basics done. I honestly don't think it can be recovered at this point.
Oh wait…
Brandon Sanderson was not lucky, he worked hard.
Companies should align product with customer expectation, the problem is when the product is shares of stock instead of the consumer product.
Knowing what gamers want isn’t hard. They want games that don’t suck. You might try to build something great, and only end up with something good. But if your only real passion is making money, then the games you make will never be “good” no matter how much money they make.
Larian grown to 450 people to build it and it's just internal staff. It's hard to imagine how many more people worked on localization, voice-over, QA / LQA and as countless contractors to on whatever aspects they couldn't do in-house. It can be very well be 1000+ people.
I not trying to say it's impossible to make good games, but making one at this scale it is literally like a rocket science.
This meant tireless focus on the nature of making an enjoyable game. Not addiction science, not investor pandering, not holiday release cycles... fun, story, and player agency.
It's really takes a lot of work on financial and investor attraction side when you making game that likely cost more than $100,000,000. Amount of bizdev talent and work required to pull it off is not that far from "making a good game" part.
See the amount of vampire surivors clones on Steam.
Author also forgets what it takes to build fanbase of a size to even have this crowdfunding compaign. Larian was founded in 1996 and they did kickstarter for D:OS in 2013. Majority of game studios rarely live for 10 years even if they manage to release successful title.
I wont even start on the fact there been very short timeframe of Kickstarter hype. Today studio without a big name can barely get $100,000 and with current interest rate attracting extra investments is even harder because to make even very small game you need at least $200,000.
I talking from experience since I (with co-founders ofc) also trying to build game studio making original hardcore buy-to-play games. We already have not-so-indie team of 15 people, but our burnrate is laughtable compared to any VC startup.
Yet making games is extremely difficult business: you need a lot of highly skilled and motivated talent; budgets and deadlines are always insufficient; and even then making deals with publishers is hard and deal negotiation can easily take months while cash gap can easily kill you.
Building community big enough for successful crowdfunding will takes years and keeping people who give you money happy is almost impossible. Majority of developers from Kickstarter hype times failed miserably here. It's simply impossible goal to most game developers with tons of loyal fans, let alone some random SaaS startup.
48% negative return on money put in. Not exactly great.
The best part about this is that they're one of the few developers who are making co-op games. I really appreciate that since I can play with a friend on the couch.
This might be one of the most childish takes I have ever witnessed in the wild.
"hey, now don't expect quality, it's not like we can deliver it"
Either way, the AAA take on Larian's success is extremely telling - especially some of the mocking/hostile takes. They aren't going to learn a damned thing.
After the many AAA trainwrecks this/last year, everyone should understand game development is hard and most games will likely suck. That's fair. But most games these days suck because they're actively made with anti-consumer practices as their foundation. That's not fair to consumers, and devs need to learn this lesson, because their corporate bosses won't.