Piranhabytes and Jowood separate, Gothic goes Console

[Vault Dweller]

Wow....

Anyone have figures on Gothic 3 sales? I find it hard to believe that it made no money. Surely the German audience alone would have made up the development costs?

Here is how it works:

"To help everyone better understand, I will explain Publisher funding vs. Developer return process. I'm going to simplify it a lot, but this is more or less how it works.... and it's really quite amazing...

After they agree to fund your game for 6 million, you begin production. They give you 500k a month upon receiving, reviewing, and approving your milestone. They are basically checking every month to make sure the game is actually being made and going in a good direction Fair enough. To keep things easy, let's say the game ships on time and they've given you a clean 6 million bucks.

Ready?.... You get 10% of the royalties of the game! So like if the game sells 1 million units at Electronics Boutique for 50 bucks a piece, you get 5 million dollars coming back at you right?!??!

WRONG

EB bought the game for 40 dollars and sells it for 50. Now the publisher takes away their expenses of producing the full color manual and the pretty box and such which we'll say is 10 bucks (usually more like 7, but let's keep the math easy). So now we are down to 30 bucks, and you get 10% of that... 3 bucks.... but WAIT!!! Your 3 dollars doesn't go into your pocket, your 3 bucks goes to pay back the publisher what you borrowed to make the game. They did give you 6 million dollars. So before the developer see's a check in the mail, you would have to sell 2 million units!!!!! So before the developer gets a check, the publisher gets 30 million dollars coming in."

http://www.rpgcodex.com/content.php?id=130

 

[Mayday]

Haha, why don't they just sell through teh internetz?! LAWL

 

[golgotha]

The biggest graphical problem nowadays isn't the high requirements, because you can tone down the settings. The problem is that when you tone down the settings, the games look like crap.
Seriously, I prefer Ultima VII graphics to Oblivion on lowest settings.

Thats because most all "next-gen" titles are much more shader (normal and parallax mapping/HDR) heavy rather than geometry (polygons/vertices). Given that most older cards were developed the other way around, you're left with having to turn off what they've built the graphics engine around and left with the basic low-polygon models. In the end, most of the models and terrain like ass since they're low-poly and theres no normal mapping to hide the fact.

 

[FrancoTAU]

Haha, why don't they just sell through teh internetz?! LAWL

Than who is going to cut the pay checks for your 100 person team during the 3-4 years of dev time?

It's a bit different with Age of Decadense, Eschalon, Broken Hourglass who are comprised of 3 or 4 guys doing it part time for a decent cut of the eventual sales. You either need a Publisher to fund you or some investment firm like Bioware & Bethseda got.

 

[Elwro]

Holy shit. Elwro has psychic abilities!

Elwro has to buy lottery tickets for us all now.

Yeah, I'm kinda happy my mad precog skillz worked, but I'd really prefer to get a combat system patch instead. :-(

JoWood has an abysmal history of working on patches, it's a shame PB were connected to the company for such a long time. I wonder, what will they do now? If they can't develop Gothic 4...

 

[Julio]

Stuff

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS

 

[denizsi]

And Gothic III was rushed too, wasn't it? Pirania Bytes certainly deserves to bite the dust if you ask me.

Rushed? Yes and no; the development cycle was even prolonged and they failed to meet deadlines. JW couldn't wait any longer and rushed the release.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Jowood are dicks, but PB fucked up big time with that piece of shit engine they made.

 

[aries202]

500,000 copies or even 600,000 copies of Gothic 3 isnøt that bad actually for game that only has been out for about ½ year when the sales were tallied up and counted as of March 2007.

However, if what VD is saying indeed is true, then I'd better understand why game developers do cater to the mass & mainstream market. Getting paid for their work is something everyone should be, I think.

As for Gothic going console, gothic 1 was supposed to be console game, but for some odd reason didn't go that route. (read in a thread over at rpgwatch).

While downlaoding is an option for smaller indie studios like wadjet eye games or the ones that make broken hourglass or eshalon, I don't think it would have been an option for PB, since this meant they they needed some big finance corporation to shell out the money for the devs. pay --- and to fund the games.

In the days to come when the dust settles hopefully we'll know more...

 

[Jim Kata]

Wow....

Anyone have figures on Gothic 3 sales? I find it hard to believe that it made no money. Surely the German audience alone would have made up the development costs?

Here is how it works:

"To help everyone better understand, I will explain Publisher funding vs. Developer return process. I'm going to simplify it a lot, but this is more or less how it works.... and it's really quite amazing...

After they agree to fund your game for 6 million, you begin production. They give you 500k a month upon receiving, reviewing, and approving your milestone. They are basically checking every month to make sure the game is actually being made and going in a good direction Fair enough. To keep things easy, let's say the game ships on time and they've given you a clean 6 million bucks.

Ready?.... You get 10% of the royalties of the game! So like if the game sells 1 million units at Electronics Boutique for 50 bucks a piece, you get 5 million dollars coming back at you right?!??!

WRONG

EB bought the game for 40 dollars and sells it for 50. Now the publisher takes away their expenses of producing the full color manual and the pretty box and such which we'll say is 10 bucks (usually more like 7, but let's keep the math easy). So now we are down to 30 bucks, and you get 10% of that... 3 bucks.... but WAIT!!! Your 3 dollars doesn't go into your pocket, your 3 bucks goes to pay back the publisher what you borrowed to make the game. They did give you 6 million dollars. So before the developer see's a check in the mail, you would have to sell 2 million units!!!!! So before the developer gets a check, the publisher gets 30 million dollars coming in."

http://www.rpgcodex.com/content.php?id=130

What I really find interesting in those maths is the fact that only about 7% of the money you pay goes into developing the game. Seems like the tail wagging the dog....

 

[Solaris]

PB really got screwed over bigtime by Jowood there (or so it seems). Isn't capitalism wonderful sometimes? Brings tears to my eyes it does....

Looks like Gothic 4 will be another Deus Ex 2....probably worse actually

I hope the PB guys find some comfort somewhere and keep going. I know they were partly to blame in screwing Gothic 3 up but they don't deserve this. If they had been given another 6 months on it I reckon it would have been a great game. As it is, even with all the broken shit in the game, I still enjoyed it a lot.

What a shame

 

[BigWeather]

The biggest graphical problem nowadays isn't the high requirements, because you can tone down the settings. The problem is that when you tone down the settings, the games look like crap.
Seriously, I prefer Ultima VII graphics to Oblivion on lowest settings.

I prefer Ultima V's graphics, or Wasteland's, to Oblivion's on the highest settings. Old school graphics left more to the imagination and we could be spending those cycles doing more important stuff like creating a more dynamic world.

 

[ricolikesrice]

....

heh, i wonder who jowood will get to make gothic 4.... the last good german cRPG outside the gothic series was RoA 3 in 1996 and i m 99% sure the inofficial sequel "drakensang" will be 10 steps forward in graphics and 100 steps back in content compared to original RoA games.
doesnt help our image(disguise) if the only good games we make are shooters (far cry and crysis) and awesome engines for shooters (crytek)

but i ve seen a lot of whining lately about the state of cRPGs in the german games mass media, they (the guys who rated oblivion 9/10 mind you) ask for less hack n slash and more "real roleplaying" ......and cite KOTOR as an example

 

[Lyric Suite]

Wow, that...bytes. (ho, teh wit).

 

[galsiah]

EB bought the game for 40 dollars and sells it for 50. Now the publisher takes away their expenses of producing the full color manual and the pretty box and such which we'll say is 10 bucks (usually more like 7, but let's keep the math easy). So now we are down to 30 bucks, and you get 10% of that... 3 bucks.... but WAIT!!! Your 3 dollars doesn't go into your pocket, your 3 bucks goes to pay back the publisher what you borrowed to make the game. They did give you 6 million dollars. So before the developer see's a check in the mail, you would have to sell 2 million units!!!!! So before the developer gets a check, the publisher gets 30 million dollars coming in."

Unlikely - unless some developer signed an outrageously stupid contract.

You'd probably start getting the 10% once the publisher breaks even. The publisher isn't getting 3 bucks per game: with the above numbers they're getting 30. They'd break even at 200,000 sales, after which you'd start to see your 3 bucks (for each publisher 27 bucks). Your 3 bucks goes towards paying off your debt to the publisher - but so does "your" 27 bucks. Or rather, all 30 pay the debt: the issue of dividing profits only arises at all once there are profits (unless the developer gets a great deal).

There are probably many more publisher costs involved than a manual and pretty box though - marketing costs, salaries for marketing/sales/production employees etc.. They'd probably (reasonably) want to cover those too before they start giving developer royalties. [the developers have already had their salaries and expenses covered - it's reasonable for the publisher to do the same before anyone gets royalties (presuming publisher outgoings are reasonable)]

A contract that starts paying royalties only after the publisher has covered its costs isn't really that bad (though it's not great either). If there really are contracts which give publishers 30 million in profits before the developer gets any royalties (unlikely), it's the developer's fault for signing such a stupid contract [at least if their aim is to get royalties].


On the PB issue, is it so bad that they don't get Gothic 4? It gives them the opportunity to try something fresh. Of course they'll need a new publisher, but that's no great loss - if they find one.

 

[Claw]

wait, wasn`t Gothic 3 very Hardware-intensive?

Not really. It didn't run extremely well on high-end PCs though.

most fans have probably a low cheap PC

Why would they? All Gothic games were hardware-intensive, and I don't have a high-end PC myself.

 

[GhanBuriGhan]

On the PB issue, is it so bad that they don't get Gothic 4? It gives them the opportunity to try something fresh. Of course they'll need a new publisher, but that's no great loss - if they find one.

In principle that's true, but do they have enough cash (=time) from G3 sales to develop a new IP on the fly and find a publisher without laying off most of the team? If it's true that they made no money yet on G3 it looks grim. It certainly sounds like while JoWood was looking at other options for a while, PB was betting all on Gothic (not surprisingly).

 

[Section8]

Wow, mixed feelings on this one. Like anyone else, I had hope that the rumoured "uber" patch could bring the game up to speed, so if that's lost in all of this that would be a real shame. As for Gothic itself, I'm pretty ambivalent, because it wasn't really the setting that made the games for me, it was the brilliant realisation of that setting and the mechanics driving the game world.

I can get orcs, paladins, mercenaries, dragons, wolves, dinosaurs and whatever else from just about anything. Likewise, I think any setting that had Gothic's superb social models applied to it would make for a fantastic game.

Here's hoping that PB land themselves a publisher who isn't going to push an unfinished piece of shit like Gothic 3 onto the market when it clearly could have been so much better.

 

[Ladonna]

All Gothic games were hardware-intensive, and I don't have a high-end PC myself.

Nor I in the scheme of things. It has plenty of RAM, and overall its decent, fast and uncluttered by bloatware, but its certainly not cutting edge. It was full of bugs, and finicky about hardware though.

VD, I am guessing that the contract that you hypothesized above would be given to some newb studio, but why would PB, who have 2 fairly successful titles under their belts, contract out such a large sum? Surely they would have a small-medium war chest to fund part of the game?

Also, they have some cred in the industry (I think?) so wouldn't that allow them to negotiate for a better contract than a smaller studio?

In any case, its hard to see why anyone would bother starting a software company with those odds. Or at least attempting to get above a certain level with one.

 

[Elwro]

[precog powers on]I wonder if JoWood will hire Reality Pump to use their Two Worlds engine for Gothic 4[/precog powers off]

 

[Fez]

If that happens Elwro, you should go into hiding for your own safety.

 

[denizsi]

You know, VD also provided a link in his post, meaning it's not just a hypothesized contract, it's publishers&funding 101 straight from one of the sources; Troika. Check the link.

 

[Goliath]

EB bought the game for 40 dollars and sells it for 50. Now the publisher takes away their expenses of producing the full color manual and the pretty box and such which we'll say is 10 bucks (usually more like 7, but let's keep the math easy). So now we are down to 30 bucks, and you get 10% of that... 3 bucks.... but WAIT!!! Your 3 dollars doesn't go into your pocket, your 3 bucks goes to pay back the publisher what you borrowed to make the game. They did give you 6 million dollars. So before the developer see's a check in the mail, you would have to sell 2 million units!!!!! So before the developer gets a check, the publisher gets 30 million dollars coming in."

Yep, that is how capitalism works. The people who have the capital get all the profits, while the people who actually do the work barely get anything. The best parasite system since feudalism! You voted for it, you got it.

 

[Kraszu]

Yep, that is how capitalism works. The people who have the capital get all the profits, while the people who actually do the work barely get anything. The best parasite system since feudalism! You voted for it, you got it.

The people that have money also take the risk through, people that work for PB got salary no matter haw game will sold.

 

[Hazelnut]

Jowood and PB go separate ways, the patch is in limbo, and worst of all, Jowood seems to have the rights to the IP and will get a new developer for the Gothic franchise and promise to publish the fourth part of the series on current gen consoles, implementing its new corporate strategy to move in one the console market.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fucketty fuck mcfuck!

Right now that's out of the way, what the hell? No further patch for G3? PB don't have development rights for G4? Possibly no future for PB and their excellent new engine?

Jowood, you're a bunch of fucking cunts! :evil:

 

[JarlFrank]

While downlaoding is an option for smaller indie studios like wadjet eye games or the ones that make broken hourglass or eshalon, I don't think it would have been an option for PB, since this meant they they needed some big finance corporation to shell out the money for the devs. pay --- and to fund the games.

They should have chosen Steam, then. As sucky as it is, it's better for the developers than selling it through a big ass publisher selling your game in boxes.

Remember what one of the guys of Troika said about Bloodlines [don't remember who it was] : If they had chosen Steam, they could have survived.