They’re sitting at 71% (mostly positive) for a game they released as early access. If your studio can’t survive that kind of response, you don’t get to blame the fans, you’re not managing your company well.
Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.
Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
According to Wikipedia they have at least 80 employees. Ball park cost per employee is around $10k a month (this includes more than just salary). So around $800k per month to run the studio. $9.6 million per year. So they probably spend more than a third of their earnings since launch. And Take Two got their cut (usually half of net revenue, so revenue after the store cut) before Moon Studios went independent, they only became fully independent in March of this year. So they have even less money left. So yeah they saying that they are in financial trouble is probably not exaggerated.
There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.
They’re sitting at 71% (mostly positive) for a game they released as early access. If your studio can’t survive that kind of response, you don’t get to blame the fans, you’re not managing your company well.
Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.
Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
Yep Around $26 million according to https://games-stats.com/steam/game/no-rest-for-the-wicked/
According to Wikipedia they have at least 80 employees. Ball park cost per employee is around $10k a month (this includes more than just salary). So around $800k per month to run the studio. $9.6 million per year. So they probably spend more than a third of their earnings since launch. And Take Two got their cut (usually half of net revenue, so revenue after the store cut) before Moon Studios went independent, they only became fully independent in March of this year. So they have even less money left. So yeah they saying that they are in financial trouble is probably not exaggerated.
Where did you get the “multiply by 55” part from?
There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.
I am always amazed and baffled at how statistics work