But is there any reason why a traditional publisher like EA or Ubisoft or Activision would turn down the possibility of funding a decidedly smaller scale budget game like Project Eternity? That's what confuses me- the demand has always been there for these types of games yet big publishers stopped making them alltogether. Is it just because those bigger publishers only want super huge budget games that can potentially be "blockbusters" and don't want to waste time with smaller budget games (unless they're F2P or Facebook type games)?
Opportunity cost is the big one.
For starters, due to kickstarter ironically the game can be a complete success if the only people satisfied are those that contributed. If this is achieved, with
zero sales the game could still be considered a success. Ideally Obsidian turns a nice profit and never needs to make a kickstarter again. Super ideally the game is a runaway success and makes big publishers take notice.
But opportunity cost is the biggest one. Lets say Obsidian makes $10 million in profit for this (which would be huge ROI, over 200%, but really only needs to sell maybe 150k units or so to achieve this so maybe isn't not that big of a stretch, especially if its highly regarded)
I think this would be considered "insane success for Obsidian" and probably even well enough for big publishers to take notice.
Now lets take the latest grand poombah, Modern Warfare 4 had $775m in sales in 5 days. Even if we peg the development costs at $100 million (which is probably high), and lets assume that the developer only gets half of the sales. $287.5 million in profit is still better ROI, and much, much higher in real dollars.
So you get into issues with economies of scale. In order to try to match the real dollar value, does a publisher then fund $100 million in small developments? Lets put Project Eternity at $4 million. Do you still see the same return on investment (that is, would each of them make $10 million in profit) if you were suddenly developing 25 Project Eternity games? Will there be some level of self-competition that would undermine sales at all?
You could do 25 games that don't directly compete with one another, but there will still be competition amongst yourselves for retail shelf space that will never go away, and I just don't know what sort of costs may be incurred for the level of bureaucratic support, and whether the losses there would compare to potential gains for not using larger teams focused on less products.
Then you get some games like World of Warcraft that will bring in probably close to 4 times Obsidian's Kickstarter every month alone.
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