$28,000 goal, 20K raised so far, 4000 total copies (2000 per game) for which the production has been secured with sony for vita carts... comes to $7 per game. After fees (avg 7% per game and $0.30 if using a credit card) it ends up just over $6. I think this. $28K minus fees, is the total cost of the actual production. I've seen similar numbers elsewhere for physical vita game production with Sony, though we (the consumer) aren't supposed to know it.
Further on pricing, Plague Road through LRG was $25 per game (before shipping)... this campaign has a list price of $50 for two games which comes to $25 per game. They have a $5 off per game deal going which I think is just because LRG isn't getting a piece of the pie on this one and they probably know how much of a turnoff indigogo alone is that pricing fair might help ease people into taking the risk.
Plague Road was a successful Kickstarter campaign. The thing with Kickstarter though are all the tiers and rewards they have to put together to run one as well as the time frame between start and end and when the actual money is turned over. Here we have only game rewards with no LE's, soundtracks, posters, figures, or other stuff that slows production and ends up becoming a huge mess to handle. Shipping should be pretty dang streamlined with so few configurations.
Indiegogo is a huge red flag and it's still one here, but these guys have had a successful Kickstarter, a second kickstarter (for SkullPirates), and are no strangers to physical production on the vita. In the end I think this was probably the quickest path to get funding without having to manage everything. IT was possibly the only path if they were the ones turned away by LRG. I don't 100% trust this, but I've taken bigger risks.
Once they hit the $28K goal, likely before tomorrow, I may go ahead and support the two game bundle. I supported LRG at launch with a game I didn't even want with the hopes they'd publish something I did. I can definitively say Mecho Wars Desert Ashes is pretty dang solid a game and well worth owning physically.
Correct, by a company that has never self-published anything physical. They will need to comply with ESRB submission, get cover sheets printed, arrange for replication and arrange for fulfillment. Not exactly small hurdles, assuming they have even submitted in time.
Yeah like when Retro City Rampage was self published... that was a huge risk. Or when LRG, a pretty bad developer that was about to go under as a company, came around to self publish... that was a serious risk as well. Sure they had the games on hand already but buying a borderline bad game to "support" the dev into maybe publishing something good was a massive risk. No one knew at the time that the games would end up valuable or that we'd even get some of the indie games we actually wanted to own.
I don't think they'll have the whole ESRB issue as these are not being distributed to stores. LRG was doing that and got caught and called out on it.
