If you’re one of the people who think that the Indivisible crowdfunding campaign is asking for too much money then strap yourself in.
Over the weekend, Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont from developer Lab Zero Games took to explaining why the studio is asking for $1.5 million on Indiegogo to create its RPG. You can watch it above.
Mike makes a comparison to Super Metroid, and what that would cost today just to pay the 23 core people who worked on it.
He uses the official base line for poverty in the United States to work out the minimum each staff member would be paid – that’s $20,000. Paying all 23 is going to cost your $460,000. That’s only for one year. Super Metroid took three years to make, so you multiply that by three to arrive at $1,380,000.
That’s only the cost of paying the core staff to make the game and doesn’t include, as Mike says, dev kits, marketing, office costs, internet, and so on. Plus, these staff members are pretty much living off food stamps at that rate. So it’d be more than that if you want to pay them decently for their work.
That’s quite a few million dollars to make Super Metroid. Mike then points out that this figure is nothing compared to the $100 million that Destiny cost to make.
Of course, Indivisible isn’t the size of Destiny, but Mike does say that it will take a ton of artwork to make and that will cost plenty. He added that Lab Zero’s previous game Skullgirls had about 70 people working on it due to having to outsource a lot of the artwork.
All this in consideration, you might start to think that the $1.5 million being asked to develop Indivisible in two years isn’t enough. And you’d be right. That’s why if the crowdfunding money can be obtained then 505 Games, who will act as publisher, will add another $2.5 million to the total budget.
But if the crowdfunding goal isn’t reached then Indivisible won’t happen. It couldn’t possibly happen unless a few million dollars can be found elsewhere.
