Hey, sorry to bother you after long time. But do you know on what projects is currently working the artist of MT and NT? Guy has a great talent, I would like to know which projects were so lucky to have him/her.
Kuma is unlikely to come back. As he told me, he's 'turning over a new page in his life.'
Yeah, the project management was a catastrophe. Basically, that Kuma guy simply destroyed his own studio. He had such amazing people working for him - the incredible artist (one of the best in the industry), the exceptional guy who created music for him, all those charming voice actresses... Only the script writer was quite bad.
Given he's not here to defend himself, I'm going to offer some defence of Kuma as his friend. While I won't go too much into the details for obvious privacy reasons, we did talk and I considered him a friend. I wouldn't normally feel comfortable about this, but as Studio Kuma has well and truly closed it's doors for good and a few months have passed, I feel it's only right I at least say something, especially as there is no one else around
to defend him.
His project management was not the best, but the man was very damn passionate, and laying all the blame for the failure on him isn't exactly fair in my opinion.
His Patreon account made about 3800 dollars a month before he decided to abandon Milky Touch, and it was growing. Most developers cannot even dream about such a level of support.
All of which means nothing when you realise at no point (I believe ever), Studio Kuma once broke even. The overhead costs were astronomical, and I'm going to be blunt here, if what I was told was true regarding overhead costs, (I won't go into the specifics of that because it's too personal), half of the supposed staff involved,
from a pure business standpoint... I would have fired, and told him so myself.
Kuma was always trying to look out for everyone and always trying to keep a sinking ship afloat to his own detriment for everyone elses sake.
Then suddenly he plays Cyberpunk 2077, enjoys it so much that he decides it would be nice to make his own game in a similar universe with blackjack and hookers. He abandons Milky Touch (yes, he abandoned it, it is the only way to call it). He abruptly finishes the game with 2 updates, the game that was very popular, had a lot of fans and wasn't even in the middle of the planned plot. He was told repeatedly that it was a huge mistake (including by me), but he didn't listen.
Then he started to make that stupid comic book out of his another game about Rome, that was in hiatus. No one wanted that comic. People wanted the game to be continued sooner or later. But still he paid a fortune to the artist to draw those 40 pages of pictures, more than enough to make quite a few updates.
And guess what? He wasted a year and a half to prepare for the release of Neon Touch. During that time people still paid him 1500-2000 dollars a month waiting for something great to happen. They paid him about 30 000 dollars. And what the guy does? He quickly abandons it after just two freaking updates that took him 3 months to release, because "it didn't satisfy his expectations with regard to the amount of support".
Much of these decisions came out of a desperate need to at the very least break even, Milky Touch was not financially successful despite all its years in production, it was a money sink and it's collapse was inevitable, all of these other ventures were hopeful throws of the dice to turn the ship around.
While these were wrong decisions, I believe when you put them into proper context, it's clear they weren't just his 'random whims' because he liked cyberpunk- he hoped to cash in on the cyberpunk craze to help keep things going and turn a profit.
There were many management points me and Kuma disagreed on, but as I came to understand the situation, Studio Kuma's fall came from a lack of funding (even at it's peak, it wasn't close to what was needed) and very expensive overhead costs.
It did not totally collapse because Kuma leap frogged from one thing to the next ... That was a symptom of the above issues.
