I am just curious about the business model and what assumptions are being made about the total cost of development and earnings estimate. I have jumped in on all the new wRPG kickstarters but I know very little about how much real game development costs. I just think it's a neat idea to be able to help games you like get developed.
The mainstream industry and the mainstream gaming publications always talk about how AAA games cost 100+ M to develop, how they are a dying breed, etc. Kingdom of Amalur probably sold over 1M copies but was a huge failure. The creative content in that game did not strike me as any different from what I am expecting out of PE. By this I mean dialog, artwork, story, etc. Sure the game is an action 3D game and the combat engine must have taken a lot of work, but that alone can't be the full cost because even Skyrim was said to cost over 100M and that is just FO:NV with Swords. Are marketing costs that high?
For PE, full on development of the game seems to be estimated at 17 months. If kickstarter is the only source of funding and it hits 2.55M then that gives around 150k per month. So unless there are less than 15 people working on this it won't fund labor and overhead. Also, assuming an average pledge of $25 that amounts to 102,000 copies sold.
So how much funding is coming from sources other than Kickstarter? Is Obsidian matching Kickstarter funding to some level and then banking on a certain number of sales to break even, and eventually make a profit? What is that number? I am sure a similar model is being used by the other kickstarters. So I just want to understand it a little more.
