The Cost of a Development Team and The Price of a Video Game

[anne O'nymous]

Games repeating itself is nothing new though, not even in the main gaming industry. How many "call of duties, and battlefields" now? Just as example.

Yeah, but what would you think about a company that would make both CoD, Battlefields, plus whatever other clone, all this in parallel ? It's not one year one, the second the next year, then one year later the third, and the fourth year you loop with the first again. The three are available at the same time, being their main concurrent.
Copying what succeed is a natural tendency that can be witnessed whatever the product, but here it suddenly start to feel weird ; you copy yourself and you parasite your own product. It can possibly works when you effectively sell the product, but not when you rely on a business plan like Patreon.
People who like what you do will not pledge twice because you started a second identical game. This while people who liked what you do, but not enough to pledge, will not start to do it because you're now doing a second, "not good enough for me to pledge" game. At the opposite you take the risk to loose support from those who where on the edge, because they now have to wait more between two updates of the game they prefer.

 

[khumak]

Well, I'd say there is a different between devs who do one or two side projects and the devs that do 5 and more projects at the same time.
If a dev has several abandoned projects it's usually a sign that the dev didn't plan any of his projects out, or got overwhelmed by too many projects at the same time. Anyway, I would probably not expect a dev with several abandoned projects to ever finish one.

Maybe it's just me but it seems to me that having a few side projects going on in the background has some other benefits as well. You have longer to refine some of your other ideas and flesh things out, change things, etc before you really dig in and start full development on them.

I'm still just in the planning phase for my games but I'm already finding myself replaying events and dialogs I've already written over and over in my head, sometimes deciding this one doesn't really make sense so I need to rethink it or this one went too far, I need to change it or move it to a later point in the timeline. That sort of thing. If I've already done half the renders then it's more of a pain to change things.

Maybe people with games in later stages of development are better organized about it but for me, at least in the early stages I find myself doing a lot of the work in my head while I'm watching TV or whatever. Replaying dialogs from multiple character's viewpoint, etc. In fact I find that a lot of times if I'm watching the right sort of show I'll get new ideas from what I'm watching.

The only finished products I have so far are mods but I've found that as I get to the rendering stage I'm more organized and have a better idea what I'm really trying to do.

 

[Dubolic]

I used Breeding Season as an example for the very reason it was a good example of how to create a shit show. It was the lesson that did teach me don't have to high expectations when you support someone on Patreon ;p
Hbomb was stupid, and SPurple was a dick and everyone did suffer from it....

Is Hbomb the same guy with the Youtube channel? Iirc Hbomberguy?

 

[DuniX]

Is Hbomb the same guy with the Youtube channel? Iirc Hbomberguy?

Pretty sure they have nothing to do with each other.