[forrestthewoods]

Damnit people. I've lost track of how many times the Star Command Kickstarter story has been misrepresented.

The implication is that only $4000 (post tax) was spent on the game and that's an outright lie. They spent 6k on music, 5k on marketing (poster + pax), and 1k to development/demo hardware. That's not necessarily ideal but it's not entirely unreasonable either. You can argue the marketing/hardware issue perhaps, but 6k went directly into the game in the form of music.

The real lesson to take away from Star Command is their under-estimation of time and money required to create, package, and ship backer rewards. That's the real danger that other projects should be wary of.

[mattmanser]

Huh, seems like a perfect representation that very little money actually went to development to me!

Sounds like they didn't do their sums. Also how did they spend so much money on incorporation, costs about £25 ($40) over here.

[forrestthewoods]

They are a three man team working without any pay. What did you expect the money to go to? Proper salaries and benefits for the team would be a few hundred thousand dollars, not 36k.

Spending $6000 on music counts 100% as "to development" and is perfectly reasonable. For PAX if anything they should have spent more money to create a bigger presence.

[MrFoof]

I'm genuinely curious as to how much music $6000 bought. That can afford quite a decent-length soundtrack.

For not-very-well known composers, I've been quoted in the range of $150-250/minute for music. I assume that if I went a bit higher up the chain (small-time, but established) that the price would rise.

[theandym]

As someone who's worked in independent film and has been involved in projects that have spent $10k's and $100k's in music, I dont see this as lavish or irresponsible at all. Musicians are hard workers, and deserve to be paid for their efforts. Just because the developers couldn't hack their way to a great soundtrack and paid for decent/professional work doesn't mean they misappropriated funds. I'd counter that they rightfully spent the money in places that weren't their core competencies.

Edit: I know that film isn't the same as game development, but I feel that the multidisciplinary aspect of game creation incurs costs in a far wider arena than traditional software development.

[MrFoof]

I don't see it as lavish or irresponsible either -- I was just providing a data point. If I could guarantee the sales would be a non-issue, I'd certainly love to step up the production values of titles I make with more varied soundtracks.

[monochromatic]

> costs about £25 ($40) over here

You can do it pretty cheaply over here too... but it's a good idea to get a lawyer involved, and you get what you pay for.

[vibrunazo]

> costs about £25 ($40) over here

That makes me droll. Costs around $500~1k here.

[mparlane]

One pluralised word: Lawyers.

[mparlane]

I didn't expect this comment to get so much downvoting. My guess is merely that any mention of them is bad. I was just trying to say that they didn't spend 40$ on opening their business, they spent $4000 by getting a lawyer to make sure they opened it correctly.