Cave considers crowdfunding; Potential for ports/new games!!

[evil_ash_xero]

Everybody's saying it...but there's NO WAY they are going to raise 3 million dollars. We're never going to get a new CAVE game, if they need this from a Kickstarter.

[BryanM]

Everybody's saying it...but there's NO WAY they are going to raise 3 million dollars. We're never going to get a new CAVE game, if they need this from a Kickstarter.

Ok. I'll say what everyone's thinking but no one dares to say.

Maaaaybe they could raise 3 mill bills, if only we tried being a little proactive for a change and ate the rich.

I'm pretty sure it didn't cost them $3 million to develop a new shmup in their prime anyway: I'd wager more like $500k.

Maybe if the entire dev team was five guys total and their marketing department was someone's uncle yelling on a street corner with his pants down.

[evil_ash_xero]

Everybody's saying it...but there's NO WAY they are going to raise 3 million dollars. We're never going to get a new CAVE game, if they need this from a Kickstarter.

Ok. I'll say what everyone's thinking but no one dares to say.

Maaaaybe they could raise 3 mill bills, if only we tried being a little proactive for a change and ate the rich.

Maybe we should just rob people, or sell drugs.

I can see it now. "Why'd you brain that old guy, with the top hat?!". "For the shmups. You wouldn't understand".

[BryanM]

Maybe we should just rob people, or sell drugs.

A waste of time. They've already been sucked dry by our class betters. We'd do better working an extra shift at Micky D's

[Skykid]

[

I'm pretty sure it didn't cost them $3 million to develop a new shmup in their prime anyway: I'd wager more like $500k.

Maybe if the entire dev team was five guys total and their marketing department was someone's uncle yelling on a street corner with his pants down.

No really.

Exclude marketing budgets and look at development only, then factor in the cost of new PCB kits to vendors and times that by an approximate sales figure we know they didn't reach (meaning there's no viable way to spend $3 million on production if your average unit sales are around 5 - 10k. You'd never turn a profit, it would be charity).

Also factor in that they're a thoroughbred Japanese company meaning the staff work for a little as possible, are expected to pledge absolute allegiance to their work and perform unpaid overtime rituals as a matter of course. Those curt business practices alone could shrink budgets enormously when weighed against the cash happy mainstream western development studios.

I think $500k is a reasonable estimate for the size and stature of the company and its expected profits. I'm sure Ikeda reminded himself love and passion for his work was more important than money on regular occasion.

[supabok]

Yeah, 3 mill seems like a very, very long shot.

[supergrafx77]

Your idea for a SH3 console is very cool but it's also ludicrous and has pretty much zero chance of ever being profitable for Cave.

Cave just needs to hire one dude like Darksoft.
Are you guys saying besides whatever the "SH3 console costs," say $1500 give or take, you wouldn't be up for buying carts at $200 a pop. SDOJ=$200, Akai Katana Home Edition=$200, Mushi 1.5 Matsuri=$200, etc, etc... ???
I have no doubt that w/ one great tech, and very little capital modding existing SH3 technology, that this could bring major cash via Cave's hardcore fan base.
Meanwhile, stream the crap out of the xbox ports on steam.
This will have a ripple effect = a portion of new customers getting more and more addicted to Cave games made available on steam>They will turn to the OFFICIAL CAVE SH3 CONSOLE for "proper gameplay arcade accurate and pixel experiencia'.

[emphatic]

Everyone loves cartridge consoles. Disc based gaming is lame. If they just do the CV-1000 games (that they own all rights to) it should be a piece of cake to add a pixel perfect line doubler with scanlines. Would anyone in their right mind even want a YOKO mode for a CAVE console?

[BryanM]

(meaning there's no viable way to spend $3 million on production if your average unit sales are around 5 - 10k. You'd never turn a profit, it would be charity).

uhh... isn't the profit margin on PCB's in the hundreds of dollars per unit?

DeathSmiles 360 port was most definitely their most lucrative venture in shmupery. That probably cost around $500,000 to do. The original game, even if they kidnapped runaway school kids and chained them in a basement for slave labor, was definitely $1.5 to $2 mill to produce. With a skeleton crew of around 20 core people.

[evil_ash_xero]

Wow, I would have assumed Futari or Ketsui would have sold the best. Why do the Japanese 360 owner love the deathsmiles series so much?

Well, the first one is pretty great.

I guess the sequel sold, due to the popularity of the first one. I mean, it looks like a shoddy Dreamcast game.

[cul]

Your idea for a SH3 console is very cool but it's also ludicrous and has pretty much zero chance of ever being profitable for Cave.

Cave just needs to hire one dude like Darksoft.
Are you guys saying besides whatever the "SH3 console costs," say $1500 give or take, you wouldn't be up for buying carts at $200 a pop. SDOJ=$200, Akai Katana Home Edition=$200, Mushi 1.5 Matsuri=$200, etc, etc... ???
I have no doubt that w/ one great tech, and very little capital modding existing SH3 technology, that this could bring major cash via Cave's hardcore fan base.
Meanwhile, stream the crap out of the xbox ports on steam.
This will have a ripple effect = a portion of new customers getting more and more addicted to Cave games made available on steam>They will turn to the OFFICIAL CAVE SH3 CONSOLE for "proper gameplay arcade accurate and pixel experiencia'.

That reminds me a lot of SNK's historical business model: glorified superguns disguised as home consoles with games at the same price than kidneys on the black market. Anyway, those "premium" version of games for the hardcore fan base, and shitty "regular console" ports for the pleb (if they existed at all).
That turned out very well in the end for them... or not.

[Icarus]

There's quite a lot of wishful thinking in this thread.

[Zaarock]

Better throw 3$ million at the Battle Traverse developers since they made a new CAVE game for CAVE fans
..and probably sold <200 copies

That's with 0 marketing budget, low priority on character art and maybe some uninspired patterns, but still. If high quality CAVE-clones like this have abysmal sales then where is the interest for a new game with a large budget. Seems crimzon clover did decent though?

[Skykid]

DeathSmiles... The original game, even if they kidnapped runaway school kids and chained them in a basement for slave labor, was definitely $1.5 to $2 mill to produce. With a skeleton crew of around 20 core people.

How do you arrive at that figure? If the outlay of production on Deathsmiles was $2 mil and they sold PCBs on release for NET profit of, let's say 700 hundred dollars each after all costs, including hardware manufacturing, were completed, recouping $2 million seems like a massively tall order, especially with AMI taking a cut for publishing fees. PCBs were only mostly sold domestically, and not at Nintendo style figures - the arcade was a dwindling market 30 years ago.

Based on your assumed production outlay, it seems very difficult to turn a decent Net profit on PCB sales unless that production cost was significantly lower.

[BryanM]

I dunno, how many PCB's did they print?

I mean, $500k could be realistic if they didn't have an office and all worked in a guy's garage and they spent nothing on marketing or holding promotions. And they paid programmers less than they would have made as a homeless salaryman in the park.

Akai Katana was definitely a loss leader, and the arcade was a black hole in the end for them. Hell earlier even, Deathsmiles 2 was probably a hell of a net loss w/the arcade version.

Frankly I'm amazed they're still even doing ports. SHMUPs supposed to be ded

[Skykid]

I dunno, how many PCB's did they print?

I mean, $500k could be realistic if they didn't have an office and all worked in a guy's garage and they spent nothing on marketing or holding promotions. And they paid programmers less than they would have made as a homeless salaryman in the park.

No, you're talking about additional business overheads, funds that are separated from development costs and pooled differently via separate income, investment and resources. I'm talking about the flat development cost of a single new game for the arcade that includes paying the team that worked on it and printing up the board for distribution.

If that cost was in the millions, I have no idea how CAVE could have made any meaningful profit on any of them, since print runs were very low when placed against your average console game, and sales figures equally nominal when taking into account a primarily domestic market, a dying market, and a niche genre.

To cap it all off they regularly had to service boards and upgrade them to fix various bugs or improve unfinished works, which cost even more. $2 million a new title sounds completely impossible under the circumstances - you'd be losing money - hence a Kickstarter for $3 million sounds desperate.

But there is one way it's justifiable. If we accept CAVE have been partly dissolved, I can imagine to create a brand new game would require assembly of a new team, hiring fresh blood, and getting various company sections back into operation. Those overheads could push the cost to $3 million.

[GSK]

The KS idea posted on facebook wasn't just for a new game; the proposed campaign would fund a multitude of projects, including PC ports, console ports and possibly the development of a new game, and if they hit their hypothetical $3m goal they'd be doing all those things, not just one of them. (I think they'd be crazy to attempt to fund all these things with one campaign and I don't think it's wise to attempt to crowdfund ports at all.)

Kvetching about the proposed numbers is tedious because they weren't proposed by anyone with the authority or credibility to produce accurate numbers, and also because any future crowdfunding campaign will probably be managed by Degica or some other company that will hopefully compel them to put forth a pragmatic pitch.

I mean, sure, they posted the numbers so people are obviously going to scrutinise them, but I think concentrating on the broader concerns ("I will/won't fund initiative xyz", "I expect to see x% of progress before I'll back anything", "I do/don't want to play on platforms xyz", "I'd be interested in xyz as a stretch goal", etc) is more useful at this point; let them use that info to put together a pitch that justifies whatever figure they settle on and then see if people are content to support them.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

After the initial console sales the cost of making a cart with a few chips will be really low. Yep I'm still going for the console. Believe! $800 console without game, $150-300 games. Gaming quality rarely seen in a human's home. First cart Futari Red Label $300 or bundled w/system $999.

[Skykid]

That reminds me a lot of SNK's historical business model: glorified superguns disguised as home consoles with games at the same price than kidneys on the black market. Anyway, those "premium" version of games for the hardcore fan base, and shitty "regular console" ports for the pleb (if they existed at all).
That turned out very well in the end for them... or not.

Somebody lacks a grasp on gaming history. The Neo Geo AES was one of the longest running consoles of all time, and was extremely successful.

It was a string of later, bad/unfortunate decisions that crippled SNK, including the Hyper 64 and the inexplicable black and white Neo Pocket.

[finisherr]

Just going to put this out there. A good developer in the gaming industry easily costs about 130-150K USD. The project would need management, in addition to marketing, art design, sound design, etc. Plenty of other overhead. It makes sense that Cave would need a few million to get a new game out the door.

Having said that, I really don't think they're asking for too much to launch a game. My only hope is that there are some hardcore fans with deep pockets that would contribute to make it happen.

[Stilghar]

All a kickstarter would "cost" is a few hours of crunching numbers and a couple of days for a marketing employee, that seems realistic to me. There's no risk, that's why they are talking about using it.

After doing 2 Kickstarter campaigns myself this was hilariously funny and insulting at the same time. Doing a Kickstarter aiming to succeed is tons of work.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

You are assuming Cave would have the same experience? They don't have to come out as a new gamble and try to establish trust, they have 20 years experience making danmaku games and game hardware. In theory they would just need to announce it and treat a kickstarter page as a home page. In other words you have something you want to try to sell and selling is hard, but Cave's reputation would instead make it sell itself. It is just a theory but comparing Cave to a newcomer is silly. We already want the product.

[BulletMagnet]

We already want the product.

The problem is that "we" are not a large enough group to make this happen on our own, and to the rest of the world, gamers very much included, Cave - and the genre itself - might as well not exist. This state of affairs is what got Cave where it is in the first place, and acting otherwise isn't going to get them out of it.

[HydrogLox]

You are assuming Cave would have the same experience? They don't have to come out as a new gamble and try to establish trust, they have 20 years experience making danmaku games and game hardware.

There are other points of view - I imagine that neither Aksys Games nor Rising Star Games share your Cave enthusiasm. After Deathsmiles Aksys Games felt compelled to split the risk with Rising Star Games for Akai Katana and subsequently neither of them showed any interest in localizing DDP-SDOJ even for GoD (i.e. without the ridiculous Xbox 360 print run constraints) resulting in an all-region release without any internationalization. So from the Aksys/Rising Star Games point of view DDP-SDOJ (and Cave) was at best "not worth the gamble" or at worst "a lost cause" - it really doesn't matter how much any single STG enthusiast desires to get their hands on the next Cave game (unless they willing to (individually or collectively) spend millions of their own money for the development of that game) - in terms of numbers there needs to be a minimal critical mass of customers to make the product worthwhile - and a lot of Cave fans seem to habitually either 1) underestimate the effort and cost of developing a competent game or 2) overestimate the total number of the fan base (be it Cave or STG) they belong to (or both).

[MR_Soren]

A shmup getting three million via crowdfunding is absurdly hilarious.

This completely. What are they thinking?

I'm pretty sure it didn't cost them $3 million to develop a new shmup in their prime anyway: I'd wager more like $500k.

An interview in the mid-late 2000s stated that it cost Cave about a million dollars to create a new game.

[CWM]

You are assuming Cave would have the same experience? They don't have to come out as a new gamble and try to establish trust, they have 20 years experience making danmaku games and game hardware. In theory they would just need to announce it and treat a kickstarter page as a home page. In other words you have something you want to try to sell and selling is hard, but Cave's reputation would instead make it sell itself. It is just a theory but comparing Cave to a newcomer is silly. We already want the product.

It's a theory based on nothing but wishful thinking. Go ahead, find me one half-assed KS campaign for a video game that got over 1 million. Only one I can think of was Shenmue 3, which was not so much half-assed as mismanaged, and which only succeeded because of how strong the brand is.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Of course it's wishful thinking, but what I'm talking about wouldn't cost a million dollars because the software is done and the hardware is 99% designed already. The only software change needed would be flip on free play, that's 30 seconds of work. You sell 1,000 consoles at $1,000 each and 1 game, then sell 1,000 copies of a couple of other already-done games and you have enough to fund a new game. In theory.

[Squire Grooktook]

You are assuming Cave would have the same experience? They don't have to come out as a new gamble and try to establish trust, they have 20 years experience making danmaku games and game hardware.

Honestly you seem to be kind of out of touch with the reality of the modern gaming world if you think enough people know or care about Cave, their experience, or the genre itself to make that fact matter. 90% of the people that this would matter to are a part of this forum. Let me rephrase the quote in a way that's more realistic:

They have to come out as a new gamble and try to establish trust, because they have 20 years experience making ultra niche games that nobody outside of an incredibly tiny niche knows or cares about, and hardware for a dying market that barely exists outside of Japan.

Right now, Indivisible, a fairly lengthy action rpg (not a niche genre) from the developers of Skullgirls (a pretty massively well known, high quality fighter, not a niche genre either), with the same lavish hand drawn animation that got Skullgirls into the Guinness book of world records for "most animated"...is struggling tooth and nail to get the (completely necessary to develop the game) 1.5 million that they need.

The fact of the matter is, gamers are mostly babies with shit taste, so getting funding isn't as easy as you seem to think.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

So you (and everyone else arguing with me) are saying specifically that Cave couldn't sell on kickstarter say 1,000 consoles bundled with Futari Red Label cart at $999 USD each, keeping in mind bulk buys by game sellers and ebay/internet/whatever resellers, and that they couldn't afterwards sell say 500 carts each of several other SH3 games priced $150-300 each? If they don't reach the kickstarter goal, then they don't reach it. There's nothing lost.

If they put the idea up and everybody wants to be a frigging Debbie Downer then so be it I guess, that's what's happening here.

Anyway it doesn't need a million dollars to start this, I just got sidetracked to that number. They could sell an initial batch of whatever. It's not like they printed 1,000 of each of their arcade games. This is a realistic idea to bring in funding for new games, look how many pcbs they have made. The hardware parts cost jack and the software is done aside from maybe a system bios.

[Squire Grooktook]

at $999 USD each

Maybe 10-20 people on this forum would buy it. Producing those 1000 "consoles" would probably take a lot more more money than you think.

No offense, but I think you (and other people in this thread) have never developed a commercial game, and don't know the kind of costs it takes to do any of these things. I haven't either, but I've read enough to know that this is sadly not how it works. If you're working with more than 2-4 guys in a basement on their free time, then sadly Soren's 1mil sounds about accurate. Doujin is the future.

The posts in this thread reminds me of that South Park episode where Cartman won his own personal amusement park, and slowly realized how much costs (often from various mundane little things) add up till the whole idea becomes completely unfeasible. Game development is pretty much the same (and then we add hardware into the mix...).