Indivisible is a new action/rpg from indie developers Lab Zero, in partnership with 505 Games. It was announced earlier this month with a whopping price tag of $1.5m to reach their target crowdfunding goal and 505 Games has promised a further $2m should they reach the funding goals; this brings the total to $3.5m.
The game has just 25 days left to reach its target and so far they have received 25% of the funding, the total standing at $379,457.00. There could be many reasons the campaign has suffered a slow start but Lab Zero’s Mike Zaimont released a tell-all YouTube statement regarding the costs.
“$3.5m dollars is the real number it would take to make this game. It is not inflated or anything like that, after a lot of negotiation we were able to convince 505 to be nice and put in $2m of the $3.5m that we need, which is slightly over half, and take care of a lot of the other development costs like localisation and testing and marketing and stuff. They are a publisher. They are not our publisher.”
Zaimont went on to state that the federal poverty line the US is $20k and using Super Metroid as an example, it took 23 people to create that game and 3 years to create. That equates to $460k annually on the poverty rate for employees, not including non-salary costs such as office space, internet, marketing, development kits etc. He concluded:
“Now let’s increase that to what a lot of people in parts of the United States consider to be a semi-decent/semi-crappy salary: $40k a year, We know from making Skullgirls approximately how many people we will need to make Indivisible in the timeframe that we’re looking at and it is more than 23 people.”
After calculating the costs and adding up how many people will be working on Indivisible, Zaimont explains that they’re also pushing to get the game out in 2 years instead of 3, resulting in extra staffing. So that is the reason for the $3.5m price tag as that is the actual cost.
Lab Zero have stated the game is inspired by Super Metroid and Valkyrie Profile. Many fans of the indie developers have criticised them for putting such a high price tag on the end product, there is already a prototype/demo available and this has led them to believe it is half finished already.
“That prototype was the result of about three months and one week of super intense work by a very small team of people, That does not translate into an entire RPG. We are trying to do this as honestly and normally as we possibly can. And we are meeting exactly the same resistance as if we hadn’t tried to do that, which is really frustrating.
Donations to the campaign can be made below. What are your thoughts on the price tag? Justified? Or just too damn much?
