Reply To: Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game – Shipping surcharge

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@redscope I suspect that they were late in informing us as backers because even they believed their own version reality …
As such I’d argue that they were not misleading us, because they were already misleading themselves.

We all know the “just one more turn/one more hour/one more thing” bit when playing (video)games.
In planning/production tunnel vision can create much of the same ‘just one more day …’ type of thinking.
The only fix for this is to have outsiders point out the cold hard truth.

I didn’t back Anastyr simply because I just didn’t like the game itself.
I do agree that 200k was too low a target for a game of that nature to be done.
I blame the very nature of the “funded in x minutes” messaging has tempted far too many creators to set a budget that is too low to be realistic while using stretchgoals as a means to actually get to a more realistic target.

The ‘fix’ for this would be a breakdown of time/budget/personell …
It’s “easy” for software/digital projects as you don’t need to budget for materials :

= pick minimum wage

= count the number of people listed on the project

= months until deadline

Basic math tends to show that a 50k budget project is unrealistic, unless there’s just one team member doing everything in one year. So 200k would be a 4-8 man team at 25k-50k salary (exclusing operating costs and material … ) with a deadline set at 12 months from funding. This effectively means that you need a source of money (either retail or web-based) that helps fund operations.

As such I’d argue that we shouldn’t blame companies, but also look at us as backers to see if we really did our job at analyzing if the project could work with the given parameters. Complaining that a project fails after funding without doing even basic math to prove it can be done is kind of silly IMHO. It’s like buying a lottery ticket and then complaining that you didn’t win the jackpot … You know that your chances are ridiculously small before you do.