Why do devs constantly run out of money when making their Kickstarter games?

Why do devs constantly run out of money when making their Kickstarter games?
Just ask for the total amount you need up front.

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A hungry artist is a productive artist.

Turns out slave drivers do an important job.

It's scope.
Artists don't know how long projects take and shit changes in production. In the case of Barkley, the reach far exceeded the grasp.

Too many cooks with no defined menu to make dishes for.
Far more people working on it than there needed to be and ever single one of them wanted to fuck around making there own bullshit for the game instead of working torwards a goal.

>ask for the total amount needed
you're assuming projects will run just fine with no problems such as coding taking longer than predicted, workers suddenly not working, hardware/software issues

listen here retard. I am a game dev and I also work in marketing. I will try to explain it so a noob like you can understand it:
1.) that's how advertising and marketing works:
You have to present all the good stuff of your product better than they are to make the money you spent to making the product. The more check boxes the game ticks, the more people buy it, even if the checkboxes are not content in the actual game. It's like you make a stale bread and in the ad you sell it as the best cake ever.

2:) Back to kickstarter:
The cost to make a game will always be more than the things you tell people the game can do. The more you promise, the more the game will cost, but also the more money you get, but the more impossible it is to make the whole game.

Making games is hard. If marketing would be dead honest, you wouldn't support most games, not because they are bad, but because you need to be CONVINCED. And even if it is your dreamgame they are making, you need more to be convinced.

This is what marketing does. it presents a product in a hightened, idealized way, to squeeze as much out of the market it can. Which in games sector is not enough, because making games is the hardest thing on this planet.

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Kickstarter backing is a front to get actual funding from private investors
It's a way for them to gauge what kind of engagement the audience would have with their supposed dev

Why don't they just make the game then ask for money?

>I am a game dev and I also work in marketing.
> because making games is the hardest thing on this planet.

Hi, I'm a game dev and I could churn out an RPG Maker game for free in about six months tops using my spare time. Please explain better, in marketing terms, how the same can't be done for $120,000 when it's four times the asking price, and goes against everything you just said?

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At least I learned to never gamble with kickstarter again

you sound like you are incompetent at project management

>Why do devs constantly run out of money when making their Kickstarter games?
>Just ask for the total amount you need up front.
How do they know how much they are going to need upfront?

Projects like these will often just put their ideasguy as the manager, even though he's not fit to manage zip. Projects without managers rarely succeed unless infinite time and budget are given.

You literally learn that if you study how to work in any field. You can't know for certain down to the cents, but you have a good enough ballpark.

>run out of money
*run away with
ftfy

>Hi, I'm a game dev and I could churn out an RPG Maker game for free in about six months tops using my spare time
Not him, but do you really fucking think you could make an interesting RPG Maker game? At least say you use GameMaker for fuck's sake.

>Just ask for the total amount you need up front.
This is what Indivisible asked and the price was 1.5 million to convince a PUBLISHER to give them an extra 2 mil.

Games are expensive user, though Barkley 2 was a scam from the start so it doesn't matter how much money it takes.

I work as a dev (not games, but it's roughly the same)
Superior comes to me and tells me about a project, asks me how long it will take
I say him a number that I think is realistic
But that's too long user
Ok, here's the number you want to hear
Time passes, the second number wasn't good enough and the project finishes closer to the first number
user why did you say you needed second number
Gee i wonder why

Now translate that into kickstarter, your superior being an unknown amount of people and you give the second number without ever mentioning the first number. But you didn't just give them the second number, you promised a portion of people dates at restaurants, plush animals and merch, their names engraved on the moon while also mixing this with the number you're giving out.

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this is true but not the reason projects like this come to a halt or fail miserably, see for example mighty no9 even being a hack im pretty sure inafune is aware of what problems could a protduction face and still some how after all thy esoears at crapcom he somehow managed toat ton ke into account any of that? Thruth is that most people on kickstarter are in because they the money and dont give a fuck about the people paying them or the projects in the first place.

That's mostly the case for Kickstarter projects that reach millions in funding.

He easily could but then it would take him more than fucking six months.

delusional

and you are a jack of all trades asshole? go fuck yourself you fucking trash kid. Holy shit you are stupid. Wish Yea Forums was for adults only so we had less stupid diaper shitters like you

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You sound like the faggot in this fictional conversation, though.

It's almost as if communism doesn't work.

>Just ask for the total amount you need up front.
You mean the imaginary amount of money that nobody can actually estimate with any amount of accuracy? Alright armchair executive Yea Forums.

People are idiots (including you) and if the real amount is asked up front they always think it's too much. Look at the retards on here who complained about Barkley 2 getting 120k KS money. 120k is nothing, thats like 3 very cheap full time staff members for only one year, at most.

>it would take him more than fucking six months
Depends on the intended length of the game really. Modern RPG Maker being so modular with plugins and shit means a lot of the potential changes to the various systems is already done and available for free online, freeing up devs to focus on things like graphics, music, and putting the game together. Depending on the amount of assets required, it could be pretty easy to put together a solid ~5 hour game in 6 months.

Kickstarter is an advertistment tool. There's a reason why the only successful Kickstarters are the projects that end up with plenty of external, private funding from legitimate investors.

The user said specific intereting projects. You have no idea how much time actual good art and passable writing and worldbuilding mixed with gameplay can take. You have several examples of games you described and all of them look like freewares, yes. If that's your intent then fine. But an actual interesting project would take easily more than just six months, specially if you are alone. I have yet to meet a single RPG maker project with all the effort and done by one person that was done in six months.

Even hylics that looks nice and is like 3 hours long at most is pure garbage in gameplay and anything else that isn't the graphics or some animations.

WRONG.
I ran a kickstarter for my westernized Touhou clone, raised $40,000, and spent most of it on living expenses. That's the reality. Most devs are spending their Kickstarter funds on booze and hookers. For real.

the more money they get the more feature creep gets introduced, unless there's an actual professional team on payroll like larian or yacht club

Anything to do with programming inevitably takes longer and more resources than originally intended. Most Kickstarter teams don’t properly account for that when setting goals.

>Anything to do with programming inevitably takes longer and more resources than originally intended.
Lmao. You sound like every tech-illiterate normalfag ever. Programing takes up almost no time compared to art and music. Just because you don't know how to program, doesn't mean it's rocket science. It's not. It's easy as fuck.

>kickstarter project
>looking for more than $1000

>financial breakdown is a pie chart with a couple of paragraphs
>every 'breakdown' is incredibly unspecific and obviously just has some random amount thrown onto it
>apparently they know this 6 month+ project is guarenteed to be finished on time and to budget and so don't even need to factor in slack time / budget
Who the fuck is donating to these projects when the project managers blatantly have no concept of financial administration?

>Just because you don't know how to program, doesn't mean it's rocket science. It's not. It's easy as fuck.
It’s my day job, retard. Whenever you organize goals for a sprint or some other organizational unit of time, you *always* leave yourself room for a buffer in it since 8/10 times something will come up that will force you to spend extra time working.

Maybe try writing something more involved than shell scripts before you pass judgment.

>Programing takes up almost no time compared to art and music.

>you can literally program art and music
lmao okay faggot.

Yes, and it looks like shit most of the time because you are a programmer, not an actual artist.

Oh great, it seems that /pol/ got in the thread already.

And you sound you never had a fucking job. Because thats how that works.
Worked on a project with was more out there research but also was required to actually result ins a sellable product. So when Phillips (the company who was paying the bills) asked "how long will x take?" we couldn't really because nobody had ever done it before. So what they usually did was saying upfront "How long will x take, and tell us it will take two weeks because thats what we planned for it".
it didn't take two weeks

They’re laundering money.

...are you really this ignorant? Is this some Duning Kruger shit because you never had to do with real software development?

they didn't run out of money, the project was doomed from the start because of bad management

Estimating how much money you need is hard and most devs don't really have a background in accounting.
The fact that they are their own boss can lead to slowing down work, recklessly spending money and generally "taking it easy"
But shit happens, and unlike more conventional studios there's no other source of potential ncome

Programming don't take as much time as art, animation and music which is why it is very common for devs to test with blocks or pre made versions sprites or graphics. However that doesn't mean it is a useless skill or that it is also "easy" to do. All of them have some value.

At least we got Dark Draker out of this mess.

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You are not everyone.
The Guy who worked on the project came out and said the guy who made the kickstarter didn't even work on the first game. hired a few of the original devs and a large portion of ADHD ridden idiots who could work together because they all had thier own idea about how the game should play.

Nobody was organized. Hired and payed too many people. People that were basically making their own versions of the game and never had a goal in mind for the get go.