Unrest: An Honest Postmortem of a Kickstarter Success
by Adam “Rutskarn” DeCamp, Lead Writer
Lack of transparency is one of the ugliest trends in game development. Sometimes it's necessary, sometimes even legally required, but the standard of not talking about what's going on with development can't help but hurt old studios and new kids alike. There are a lot of pitfalls in this industry. It's a shame to see people falling into the same ones again and again.
There are people out there setting up Kickstarters who have no idea what they're doing or how they'll allocate the money. Sometimes these people get nothing â€" or sometimes they get hundreds of thousands of dollars. When these teams fail, their follow-ups tend to be face-saving PR statements or grave silence, depending on which is more fiscally advisable. And thus, the way is cleared for another generation of well-intentioned misappropriations.
When we at Pyrodactyl Games launched our Kickstarter last June, we promised that we'd give our backers and the general public a frank postmortem. Now, we never did get in over our heads. We made mistakes, and to some extent I think you can argue we were in over our heads to begin with, but we managed to deliver a game we're proud of. But we saw a lot of ways this project could have gone south, and part of what we're here to accomplish is to make sure future teams deliver as well. This report comes from thirteen months in the trenches; it is based on experience.
But this post isn't just for indie devs, and it's not just for our backers: it's for anyone who considers backing a game in the future. Before you support a project, it's important that you know what money does for indies and what making a game with a small studio looks like. This is something that even the press sometimes doesn't understand, if some of the questions we've gotten are any indication.
First warning: the content that follows may come off a little bittersweet. That's just what things are like for indie developers. Know before I continue that we are all personally, deeply, humbly grateful for each and every person who took a chance and backed Unrest. We loved making Unrest, we are all incredibly proud of it, and that we hope it will succeed. I don't know if I've ever worked on something I thought was so wonderful, different and rule-breaking. I'm deeply grateful to the people who made it possible.
Next warning: I am going to be talking about things that are almost always considered taboo. I will discuss my salary. I will discuss the salaries of other team members. I will discuss what my work situation was like and how we stand to fare in the future. I will do this because practically no-one else does, and it's a gaping hole in the discussion.
But firstâ€"let's talk about the biggest mistake you can make.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Unrest: An Honest Postmortem of a Kickstarter Success”
Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.
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