Quote from: Alias on February 14, 2014, 11:46:06 AM

Quote from: jambola2 on February 14, 2014, 06:32:33 AM

I was trying to share it among some of my friends , but most of them have the same doubt as me :-

I am pretty sure that the game will be funded and even if it is not funded , we shall get refunds.
I am not scared of being scammed , because you seem trustworthy enough and have a reputed member escrowing too.
But the problem is , what if the game does not sell much after being made ?
How can our investments be considered a "risk free Bitcoin investment" , when there is a high risk that the game will not gain enough popularity after being released ?

PS : Any estimate for end of the worlds becoming a full game ? So far it is awesome ( and addiciting ) Cheesy

You need to break things down to the fundamentals. Forget about Bitcoin for a second. The guys here have all the elements to make a very enjoyable and thoroughly engrossing game. Go do some research on the "point and click"/"graphical adventure" game genre. Notice the emphasis that these games put on quality. Quality art, engaging story. Good games get played by a lot of people. There is also a lot of longevity to games like this. People today still play graphical adventure games from the the 80's and 90's.

Now back to Bitcoin. The story of Bitcoin is one of the most interesting in the history of humanity. From it's conception to it's adolescence to it's ongoing maturity and it's continually changing future possibilities, the Bitcoin story is one of incredible mystery and confusion.

TLDR: What Voodah and his team are doing is using one of the best story telling mediums ever to tell one of the best stories ever. If that won't be popular, I don't know what will.

Thanks for these kind of talks, I really appreciate all honest debate (and thanks Alias for your spot on words as well).

And yes, I understand your concerns. When I was thinking through this whole process, your concern was my main one as well. I disliked how Kickstarter gives nothing back to backers who put above the minimum, and I wanted to reward our backers with a stake in the game's success. I thought long and hard about how to do it in a way that makes achieving full ROI a reality, instead of an impossible (as has happened to me in other investments like mining).

Right off the bat, the first consideration was to not auction the shares. If I let the share price go sky high, no one would ever get ROI. Thus we did this with a capped maximum funding and fixed % equity based on the USD value put in. So naturally, next came thinking of the actual numbers to make it work as I intended. I did a lot of research on the sales data of indie games, they're infrastructure and the relationship with Steam, Desura and the mess the industry is in right now regarding the Bundle sales. The chosen numbers reflect my plan of having the backers get full ROI before 2500 copies are sold, which is a ballpark number of what an unknown non-megasuccessful indie game typically makes if it can NOT manage to go into Steam. This is the "floor", unless your game is utter shit and nobody ever wants to touch it.

So the key here is of course, distribution; and the king is of course Steam. Once a game gets into Steam, poor sales are usually in the order of 10k copies sold (consider Steam gets a big NDA protected cut of that). At the very beginning I even considered forgoing and shunning off Steam because they don't yet accept BTC, but after careful analysis of the industry and going through the numbers over and over, it became clear that Steam is an integral part of success, and furthermore, if we want to change Steam's view on Bitcoin, doing it from the inside would also yield better results than trying to be the outcast martyr.

Now everyone in the industry knows, actually getting your first couple of games on Steam is easier said than done. Greenlight did not shape out to be the great tool it was supposed to be, and some successful games (with over 25k copies sold prior to Steam) had to wait close to a year inside Greenlight before getting on the actual platform. We're getting things ready for Greenlight but at the same time, we're receiving guidance from other devs and our investors (one of em actually had a video game company which later he sold) that the best plan is to not just sit idly on Greenlight but to contact Steam internally. So that's our game plan with two attack vectors: one of our investors is already published and has a working relation with Steam, and we're also real life friends with someone who knows and worked with Bruno Carlucci (for those who don't know him, he's an Argentine, e-sports data analyst and caster on James "2GD" Harding's team who are actively working with Valve and main casters of their BIG events; if you've watched Valve's The International, he's the caster with the crazy suits and outfits). Hopefully, between those things and Greenlight we'll have a quicker entry to the store.

I invite you to check this post as well for extended sales data (a very hard to find subject because of NDA and store clauses):
http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-game-revenue-sales/

These guys have done a pretty good compilation of most of the indie sales data available.

Anyway, I see you bought a share before I could give you this answer, so thank you so very much ! We'll do our best to not let you guys down !