Could AoD make VD and co. wealthy?

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Here's what I've noticed:

There is an increasing demand for quality turn-based RPGs. Go to Ebay and search for PS:T, Arcanum, etc. They all go for over $30.00 if bought from a store instead of auction, and auctions seem to always go for over $20.00 including shipping. And these are friggin' old games! You can't buy them directly from major retailers like Amazon, etc., but they are still very much in demand!

So, assume AoD kicks ass, is released without any serious bugs, and gets lots of decent hype and reviews, how many copies could it sell?

I noticed that BG1 and BG2, for instance, sold about 2 million copies each... if AoD can get just a fraction of that action (say just 2-3%), Iron Tower should be rolling in cash!

Well, assuming AoD will be as good as we hope, it'd be nice if VD could quit his current job and become a fulltime game developer.

I wouldn't bet money on it, though.

I need no more convincing, im pirating this sucka the day it comes out

They're also harder to get though. While a new game should have at least a semi-good supply.

I thought VD was swimming in cash already...

The future of RPGs relies heavily on the whims of a Canadian millionaire with a mysterious past and a predilection for sarcastic comments. That's pretty darn good in a world with no more than six and a half billion people.

That'd make a good movie.

I'd rather VD kept his VP of sales job rather than switch to games full time. Seems to me that once you depend on something for your income, you are not willing to take risks with it - look at Jeff Vogel.

As for the potential sales, I highly doubt that the game will sell more than 5-10k copies, and that's if I'm lucky. Online publishing costs are 15-30%. Divide the rest by 4 people and 3 years, and you'll get something like 10-15k a year. Better than nothing, I suppose, but hardly enough to "go big".

It's also good to remember that Zero-Sum's Prelude was a great game, which didn't stop ZS from going out of business. Sure, the game is barely playable now, but it was perfectly playable when it was released.

What's wrong with it now? I was just about to get around to trying it out.

Apparently it crashes a lot and has all kinda performance issues. See these threads for more details:

http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=13716
http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=15506
http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=16715

Theres something wrong here....

Thats it. The game was fine when it came out, and then suddenly became buggy later :shock: I, uh, don't really get the logic in this...

And wasn't the game free? Kind of hard to stay in business when your giving your stuff away isn't it?

New patches fucked things up. They should have released the old version, but for some reasons they didn't.

It wasn't free when it was released, which was 4 years ago. At first things were going well, everyone at the Codex was playing and enjoying the game. Zero-Sum guys were talking about two planned expansion and a sequel, and then sales revenues dried out, and that was it.

I bought the game when it first came out, played it with very few bugs, and loved it. Many other jackoffs complained about supposed bugs, so I think it's like some kind of kooky Matrix-y thing where a gigantic pile of assholes manifested a lame reality.

so how's the bugginess and perforamance of AoD in its current state VD?

There are a few issues where Torque (the engine) doesn't work as advertised, but we can handle them. Takes time though.

good to hear, take your time as long as the end product is bug free.

Well, depends on the exchange rate.

I think you are wrong. First, if I never read your year in review I would've never heard about PtD in time to buy it. And if I didn't frequent rpgdot I would've never heard of your year in review. How many people heard of AoD from rpgvault/ign? AoD will have much more exposure, same as BHG.

Also, there is a direct correlation between graphics and sales. SO if spiderweb sells 5k a game, and nwn 1 mil, and we graph sales and graphics, that would set you around 250k sales, or at least 100k.

But we halve that because graphic whoreness knows no bounds. Then halve that agin because people are stupid and get 25k units sold. Then halve that because people are inherently gay and get 12.5k units sold.

If you sell the game for $30 thats a sum of 375k. Multiply that by .25 (seems right after expenses, including distribution, seeing as the 4 team members aren't getting the same share, right?) Then you make about 94k, divided by 3 and get 31k a year.

Now, thats the first game. If you make part 2 and 3, the team goes down to 2, and part 2 comes out within 1.5 years and has the same sales, and we'll say you make 33% this time. Same with 3. Now you gross 82.5k a year for 2 and 3.

Of course, Canada will want a good chunk of that to help old people wait 4 weeks for a free doctor appointment, so thats still highball. But the profit of this game comes from the long term view of a trilogy. We benefit by having more games, you benefit from living the life of a high roller big shit.

The perfect action plan would be to higher a new engine programmer, and your your artists/modellers/animators/whetever working on the assets of the ship game. You come up with the design by posting a little less, while you are working on the design of AoD 2 and 3. Now in you have a different release in 2-3 years that increases your market. Then when they are done they start working on a whole new engine with brand new assets. Everyone is gainfully employed and busy, and making a paycheck, while building skills and making their resume look fancy.

Effeciency of scale and scope, and economics of scale and scope (somewhat). You need a 5 year and ten year plan. Most starts ups are not profitable in the short term. I think you should make me president of Irontower, or at least beta test AoD.

I think VD is setting his hopes low so that he doesn´t get dissapointed if things go bad, but he knows that he can sell much more than that. Besides, he has a VicePresident of Sales & Marketing working in Iron Tower. I think that the guy knows how to sell a game

It's not about expecting less to avoid disappointments, it's about realizing that these are new and untested waters where expecting [borat]great success![/] is very unreasonable. It's a new shitty-looking game from a new studio (assuming that you can call 4 guys on teh intarnet a studio). Statistically, such things tend not to do well and the only capital one can hope to make is a strong brand value people can trust and associate with certain gameplay elements. That's good enough for me for now.

So what about cenega (1c), can you tell why it did not work out?

I didn't say that. Cenega has made a publishing inquiry, offering us certain markets, I told them that we'll discuss it later, when the game is ready to be distributed as the marketing value of the game may and most likely will change between now and when we are ready to release it.

We've been too busy the last few months to do anything PR-wise, but we'll start releasing more info, including gameplay videos, and promoting the game in the upcoming weeks.

I know, I was just joking

One thing tough, the game is not shitty looking. It looks "aged" at most, but not shitty. Personally I see it along the lines of NWN without the gloss effect and with lower quality in the models and textures.