Unfortunately your calculations are based on partial information.
If you want to estimate the willingness to pay $50 or more, you should take under consideration the fact that of those 15,623 Kickstarter backers only 3,693 of them decided to pay 50$ or more. Your assumption that there are actually 15,000 super fans who will pay $50 or more is not supported by any information that we have.
Your conclusion “Games cost $1m. KS raised $600k so it must have made $400k or more.” is unfortunately not correct. A more correct one would have been “KS raised about $600k. Additional investors paid $500k. So they collected about $1.1m and that tells nothing about people’s willingness to pay.”.
There are several threads and posts in which Ron provided additional information that is required to get a correct picture of the situation. Maybe the following post is a good start to acquire that information (notice that it was written before they broke even):
It’s been stated that game has broken even (Will we get a new game from Ron Gilbert and Team in near future?). I would interpret this to mean that it has generated enough revenue to pay back investors ($500k as you say). That means the game has generated at least $1.1m in revenue: $600k from KS and $500k since launch (I was using $1m instead of $1.1m so numbers in my first post were a bit off). So that $500k of revenue on top of the KS amount must have come from conventional sales. To keep estimate on the low side, I took the highest price of $20 to estimate that they sold 20,000 copies after the Kickstarter. Using $500k you get 25,000 copies. If the average price is more like $15 (half paid $20 on computer, half paid $10 on ios/android) then might have sold closer to 33,000 copies.
So we know they sold 15,000 copies on KS. I think my estimate that they sold 25-35k copies after launch is pretty reasonable. So it seems that you can sell 40-50k of a great adventure game in the first 6 months. This is definitely an estimate but it is based on a lot of known variables and I don’t think it can be that off.
My idea then is to try to better segment these 40-50k sales so you can extract maximum value. My guess is 15k of these customers will pay a much higher price. The other 25-35k will pay the price they paid (safe assumption I think).
With respect to super fans - you are right - 15,000 is a wild guess and I agree that super fandom might not correlate to backers on KS that closely. I do disagree that what tiers people chose on Kickstarter is indicative of willingness to pay. Personally I am not interested in the backer rewards. I think many people just want the game so they just paid $25 for the game or maybe even waited until after launch and paid $20. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid more if that’s what it would take to get the game.
There are some indies who are trying hire prices on launch with some success (The Witness is a good example of how this can go well). You definitely have to have a great reputation but no doubt Ron and the team have this.
I am curious if you could raise more money from kickstarter if you only tell people that the goal is not yet reached, but you don’t tell by how much. (in all or nothing mode). This way I would offer an amount closer to what the game is worth to me. (But maybe it wouldn’t make much difference…)
That’s the point: I was informing you that those $500k didn’t come from sales but they came from private investors, as stated in the post by Ron that I linked to.
While the $500k originally came from investors, if Ron is saying game broke even then I expect those investors have been paid out. So the game must have made at least $500k in revenue from conventional sales in order to have paid back the investors their $500k.
Good point. I think in terms of $ it nets out because I forgot to factor that in on both sides of the equation - but it does affect the sales numbers I estimated.
Assuming “broke even” means they made back the $500k from investors after fees/taxes, that would mean they did at least $750k in revenue from conventional sales. So that means more like 37.5k to 50k copies sold on top of KS ($20 - $15 avg price). Adding on the 15k KS sales that comes to 52.5k - 65k copies sold in the first six months.
When I say “break even”, don’t read too much into that. Investors don’t get “paid back”. It’s not a loan. They put up money and then get a percent of all the money that comes in, not just until the get their investment returned. We’re still a ways from another adventure being a profitable enterprise. Most of that is due to Gary and I working for close to nothing for three years. That’s a big personal hole to dig out of. If I were to do another Kickstarter, I would need to make sure I was paid for my time, as I don’t know that I’ll ever get out of the ThimbleHole and can’t afford another.
None of this is to say another adventure game won’t (or will) happen, it’s just that it will take some thinking and figuring. Thimbleweed Park didn’t make enough to make it easy.
My guess is about 1/2. I will go back and do a complete breakdown and show the actual budget in a month or so. It might edge to programming if you include all the ports.
Well, there will always be only one true Ferrari and one true Octavi, but, seeing such a percentage of costs, I think that it would have been a great idea to crowd-source some artworks, albeit I am not sure about the feasibility of it.
I would spend all my time managing this, trying to get everyone “on model”, etc. I won’t work with people who work for free. It’s amazing how often “other stuff” becomes more important when you’re working for free. I always pay people so they take the job seriously. Anyone who had the talent of Mark or Octavi wouldn’t work for free and if they would, I’d be number 17 on their priority list.
The exception would be if we were looking for an odd eclectic mix of art, then this can work. It’s phone the phonebook worked but crowd sourcing actual voice actors wouldn’t.
I’m afraid you are right.
Even though many people (including my passionate self) would have enjoyed to contribute for free, a lot of them might not have had enough time to finish their artworks. What would it have been worth for you!
I also agree with you in terms of the talent. Nonetheless, Mark, Gary and Octavi could have polished the fan-art or refused any unsuitable artworks - for the sake of an appealing and coherent visual style.
I think I would have talent to do the backgrounds, but yeah, wouldn’t do it for free. I would require at least $10,000 to do the job (TWP scale). If I would have time to do the job, that is.
