From the Kickstarter page:
[quote]We’re asking for £100 000, which is around what we raised for Sunless Sea. The game’s actual budget is higher – £330 000. If this Kickstarter succeeds, we’ll fund the difference ourselves,[/quote]So you’re going to spend a little over 3 times more on Skies than on Seas? Why the increase in spending?
edited by Matthew Cline on 2/4/2017
The game looks a lot more ambitious. The scope and number of features are also much greater.
They have just breached 200 thousand so I doubt they won’t be able to make 330 thousand by March.
Sunless Sea was quite limited initially. I am guessing they are starting bigger - more locations and features at launch.
But do we know what was Sunless Sea’s budget? They did raised 100k, but probably, same as Sunless Skies, they funded it from other revenues as well.
Precisely so. The whole point of the quote from Failbetter is that the Kickstarter is only responsible for part of the budget. It’s effectively what they need to ensure that this whole investment is going to work out. If they get anything over that minimum (spoiler: they have), then they can either funnel it toward expanding their scope or relieve the pressure on their other resources (or, most probably, both). To judge from the response so far, having two successful and well-beloved games under their belt has given their fan base a lot of confidence in their ability to turn out something great. The more support they get, the less time someone’s spending figuring out how to pay for pesky things like bills and salaries, and that’s probably good for everybody.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest it’s because Skies is going to be bigger and better than Sea, and thus take more money to make.
If you had the means to fund it and the accompanying public interest to justify it, why wouldn’t you go bigger?
This is assuming you have the stories to go bigger and not just going bigger for the sake of it, but I’m not really worried about Failbetter not having enough stories.
I definitely hope Failbetter uses the money to expand the scope of the game. My few complaints about Sunless Sea include the gameplay getting a bit same-y after the 10th Captain and the slow pace of the game in general, particularly at the start. Neither of which is a deal breaker at all, and I love Sunless Sea, but from looking at the Kickstarter it seems like Failbetter intends to add even more content to Sunless Skies than they have in Sunless Sea, and they intend to keep the early game from getting too repetitive, all of which makes me incredibly optimistic about the game. Also, they have said that all money raised from the Kickstarter goes directly towards backer rewards and (most importantly) game development, so… give 'em money. The more they get from the Kickstarter, the bigger and/or more detailed we can expect the game to be.[li]
Wish i could give them money, but as long as there is no way to back Sunless Skies via paypal i’m not able to back this game.
I really hope there will be some kind of Early Access AND that the people who buy the EA version of Sunless Skies also get all the Kickstarter Items/Quests/whatever.
There will be early access of some form, but anyone purchasing the game then won’t get any Kickstarter items. That’s half the point of backing, after all. It sucks that prevents some people from getting the goodies but there’s no way to handle it effectively.
That is not true.
Not that some other companies also have a paypal backing possibility in theor backerkits (some of them during their crowdfunding Campaign, some of them afterwards), but you have now services which provide a really good slacker-backing possibilty.
One of them is crowdox , which was also used from Inxile for their Wasteland 3 Crwodfunding Campaign.
With this service you can not only give people other methods to pledge, apart from CreditCard-Kickstarter (or FIG), but also get the Kickstarter Updates send out without fiddling with some handmade Lists.
Its not 2012 anymore, today there are many more possibilities to make such things possible without investing big manpower to create and maintain slacker backer.
The biggest flaw is of course that many many people who really would like to back, can’t AND don’t get all the Items/Quest whatever which were available through the kickstarter campaign.
edited by Wintermute101 on 2/8/2017
edited by Wintermute101 on 2/8/2017