We'd really like a publisher to fund it from the beginning...
Or we need to come up with a much cheaper way to make games, I suppose.
> A great question, and one I'm very interested in hearing David's
> answer to. One developer I know personally who's made the shareware,
> Internet-distribution-only model work is Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb
> Software (www.spidweb.com) -- his Exile/Avernum series has been
> very successful. He noted in a column somewhere (or possibly
> on the site) that the biggest expense indeps face is art -- professional
> art costs a lot, and I bet it was a big chunk of KoDP's budget.
Was that Jeff's comment or mine? Art was the biggest single chunk of our budget, and was almost half of the total budget.
By the way, I am very dubious that King of Dragon Pass could have worked as shareware, given its size. 450 MB is a bit much to download (OK, it might be half that when compressed, but still...).
> One possible way around this would be (and I'm just throwing ideas
> around here as they bubble up) to pay artists a royalty based
> on each copy sold, rather than a big whacking fee up front for
> each piece.
IMO we wouldn't have been able to hire the same level of artists with this approach. Especially since many of the pieces had the involvement of multiple artists (thumbnail sketch, pencils, ink, color).
> QA, another big expense, can be ameliorated by, well,
> us -- many of us would jump at the chance to run QA on early
> buiilds of another A-Sharp game for no more compensation
> than a copy of the finished game and a mention in the credits.
Sorry, that's not QA. I'm not downplaying the feedback we got from our beta testers (many of whom were very helpful), but it's not the same as our in-house QA team exhaustively testing each branch of each scene, and then verifying that bugs were actually fixed.
David Dunham A Sharp david_at_... Voice/Fax: 206 783 7404 http://a-sharp.comEfficiency is intelligent laziness.
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