Support Indivisible! Refuting Common Misconceptions
Indivisible, the new RPG from the creators of Skullgirls has less than a week of crowdfunding left with almost half of its goal remaining to be reached. And while the support given so far has been massive, there are still a lot of people who are skeptical. Here’s a couple things I hear regarding Indivisible and my thoughts on them. I hope that if you have second thoughts about supporting Indivisible that reading this may change your mind!
1. The $1.5m goal is too high!
For me and you, $1.5m is a lot of money. For a game studio with several employees, contractors and overhead, it can disappear pretty quickly. The full budget for Indivisible is actually $3.5m (the publisher has agreed to provide the other $2m if the IGG is successful), with the development of the game happening over the course of the next 2-3 years.
So why does a game cost this much to develop? Let’s start at $3.5m and work our way down a hypothetical cost breakdown.
First off, there’s the fees. Normally IGG + the transaction fees takes 10% of what you make, however lndivisible gets a slightly better deal at I believe 7%. So that’s about $105,000 already gone. Then you get to deal with taxes, let’s say at another 5% - a low estiamte. So there’s another $75,000 gone.
We’ve shaved off $180,000 and we haven’t even started development yet!
The game development cycle is about 2-3 years. So now you have to factor the cost of a living wage for 8 people who work in-house at the studio. Let’s say they’re each getting paid $40,000 a year, which for a big city like Los Angeles is modest living at best, arguably even being underpaid depending on the position. Then, consider the cost of each employee in terms of minimal benefits working at that salary will incur another $800 per month per employee. Add on to that office equipment/electricity/internet/rent/etc and all that you’re looking at the very least another $8,000/mo to keep the studio fully functioning. Over the course of 3 years that adds up to about $1,262,400 gone.
We’re now at $2,057,600.
That’s $2 million left to pay all your contractors - this includes dozens of animators (Skullgirls had around 70 and Indivisible will likely have around the same amount), background artists, a musician, voice actors and whatever else is needed for 3 years. They need more animators than anything in both clean-up and color departments. I know this because I worked on both Skullgirls and the Indivisible prototype. Lab Zero is constantly sending out this kind of work and they won’t stop for pretty much the entire development process of the game! The animations are short, but the incredible attention to detail means a lot of care must be given to every frame.
Factor in Murphy’s Law and Lab Zero will be fortunate to have anything left by the end! Making games is expensive, and what they’re asking for is an honest budget that will allow them to create the game and be able to survive while creating it. If you want to know more about this topic, have a listen to MikeZ talk about it on a Skullgirls stream.
Though this leads me to another point that I see often..
2. But i’ve seen other games made for less money!
The cost of a game’s development is proportional to the amount of work and number of people required to finish it within a realistic timetable. There are games today being made anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars. All things considered, Indivisible falls somewhere in the middle of the road.
(Above: an animation I did for Indivisible - Zeibei fainting)
Hand-drawn animation is an iconic part of Lab Zero’s style, it is time consuming and requires a lot of skill and experience to create. For the amount of detail and complexity of animation required for a game like Skullgirls and Indivisible, many people are needed to help create it. All of these people need and deserve to be paid for their work.
Another thing to consider is that many crowdfunding projects undersell the true cost and over-promise features on their project pages. I don’t want to point fingers at specific projects, but i’m sure you have seen it before - a game with a ridiculously low goal for the scale of the game promised, complete with an ambiguous hype trailer dotted with concept art and not much more. The idea here is to present a perfect game with a lot left to the imagination and a seemingly feasible goal, with the hopes of smashing it quickly and presenting the “stretch goals” which will fund the true scale of the game. Some games also have the backing of a publisher and extra funds but will not outright say it. All of this is a deceptive marketing tactic to make the idea of pledging more palatable. And in the end, these practices can sometimes doom the projects after they are funded, resulting in an underdeveloped or sometimes even nonexistent product. These experiences have left a bad taste in people’s mouths.
What the Indivisible campaign is offering is the exact opposite of these kinds of misleading tactics. Presented to you is the full cost of the game, the name of the publisher, chart of the budget, and an actual proof of concept prototype of the game you can play yourself and be the judge oft. I think this is the kind of honesty in a game crowdfunding campaign that players deserve, where everything you need to know is on the table so you know your money will be well spent.
On top of this, the Skullgirls Indiegogo campaign delivered on everything that was funded, so Lab Zero already has credibility when it comes to crowdfunding.
3. I will just buy a copy of the game when it’s released!
Unfortunately, if the game isn’t funded, you won’t be able to do this! Please keep in mind that Indivisible’s Indiegogo page does not have Flexible Funding - which means that if the game doesn’t reach its goal, all the money is refunded.
505 Games, the publisher, also will not give the rest of the funds unless the goal is met - so it’s truly all or nothing!
4. I don’t think it’s going to make it!
To me, this is the same defeatist logic that you can try to apply to almost anything - the idea that you don’t make a difference. Yes, sometimes as humans we feel small and that our contributions to the things we care about aren’t felt. I think we often forget that when we are pushing towards something, we forget to look to our left and our right and see other people next to us doing the same thing, working together. Humanity is at its best when we remember this.
There are millions of 2D animation and RPG fans - only a fraction of them are needed to come together to make Indivisible happen. You might not feel like your donation alone is going to help make the goal, but what if everyone had that same attitude? Many incredible games that were funded by fans would not exist.
If it doesn’t make its goal, you have nothing to lose - your money would be refunded and that would be the end of it. But if it does, you helped breathe a little life in to a game, dozens of artists, animators, voice actors and musicians for the next few years - and you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of that in the future. And that, to me, is the coolest part about crowdfunding - the fans being able to take part and closely follow the development of the game they helped to create.
Don’t focus on the numbers and the charts and statistics. Believe, and be a part of it!
Thanks for reading, and I hope this post has been insightful. A lot of this stuff is my opinion, and I might be a little biased, but I wanted to get this off my chest. And, for good measure, here’s one more link to the Indivisible campaign. 👌
There you go, folks.
a lot of truth in this post. if you are a fan of indivisible, please please PLEASE consider giving to the IGG campaign!!!!
