I love our indie friends, in fact I went as far as to devote space here at MMO Fallout to promoting the City of Titans Kickstarter effort not to mention multiple others. And even though I added the widget to the side-bar, I never went as far as directly telling people to pledge their money. It isn’t because I don’t trust Missing Worlds Media, but because I’ve been part of enough volunteer projects to know that even with all of the best intentions, they have a tendency to die at a moments notice. Usually this happens when the most talented and dedicated of the group realize that they could do the same thing but get paid for it at a real company. With that in mind, I wrote an editorial about how the next step in City of Titans was to ditch the volunteer bit now that players had a monetary stake in the game.
As far as risk goes, a project whose employees are entirely made up of volunteers is about as high as you can go, barring an office comprised entirely of corgis working on computers built out of beef jerky. Take a moment and look in from an investor’s point of view, here you have a project of questionable direction being built by volunteers of varying degrees of loyalty, skill, and reliability, all under the leadership of an “ideas guy” powered by hopes and dreams rather than experience or knowledge. People who have little or no incentive to stay on board, especially when during times where things go sour, which they certainly will. I’m talking about Embers of Caerus, in case you’ve forgotten the headline.
Embers of Caerus is an MMO being developed by Forsaken Studios, a team of volunteers. As is usually the case, development has hit the proverbial brick wall thanks to a lack of direction, unity, and leadership, and the game has lost not only the support of many of its volunteers, but also of its potential investors. CEO Rob Steele posted on the forums to let everyone know that the game is being taken in a new direction, shifting focus to game and system design with the hopes of partnering with another studio to get the ball rolling.
As you all know, several months ago a decision was made to move to Unity to prototype our systems and provide proof of concept to community members, supporters, and potential investors alike. This transition was not seamless in terms of how it was handled internally, and mistakes were made in regards to how we released the information to the public. Those mistakes unfortunately cost us a great deal of support from one particular individual who was on the verge of providing start up funds for our office and overhead costs – enough for at least a couple of years to be sure. At the same time, this put a lot of pressure on our development team to bang out modules and updates to our demo in a timely fashion. With a purely volunteer group, it is extremely difficult to have enough man hours available, from the appropriate part of the team, to set and hit benchmarks that we have – whether set internally by us, or by others.
Business is difficult, especially for those who don’t have any experience. And this isn’t just video game companies, either, so don’t think I’m picking on them. There is generally a 40-55% percent chance that a business will go under in the first four years after opening, no matter what industry you are in, and 46% of those cases are due to “incompetence,” or lack of knowledge and experience. That statistic comes from this website, by the way.
I apologize if I sound like a jerk or that I’m picking Embers of Caerus out and ignoring other examples. I’m talking about Embers of Caerus because its redirection prompted this article, and I didn’t include other examples to keep it focused and avoid rambling. As far as being a jerk about the whole ordeal, that is business. I have said time and time again that this is an incredibly high risk, high price, saturated market. There is also great potential for success, but the path to success is littered with failure. A lot of authors said that.
In case you also noticed, I used a screenshot from Black Mesa Source to show an example of a volunteer project that became something great, so it is absolutely possible.
(Source: Embers of Caerus)
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