A lot of people are mad and rightly so because 300 grand of their Kickstarter money is amounting to nothing. But that is actually not the real story of today’s video. It’s about two games and one formula. A formula that listening to say Jeff Keley at Summer Games Fest is the big new thing. Now one of these games has became gaming’s darling. Rightly so. The other one has actually just collapsed and died. So here’s what’s happening. Clare obscura expedition 33 has succeeded. And now everybody wants to replicate that magic formula and that is a small team XAA talent and a love of JRPGs. But you know apply to whatever game you want to make. But here’s the thing. In the very same month that Expedition 33 dropped, another game was revealed with an eerily familiar setup. A small French team with many ex Ubisoft developers making their dream JRPG. Just that unlike Expedition 33, that game is now dead. The studios liquidated and the crowdfunding backers are furious. So, what the hell happened? Why did this formula fail, even though when you look at it, the game really does look quite good? I’ll give you a hint. Here’s a map of Expedition 33’s connections. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of chatter. I couldn’t have been easy. And it’s not to put them down. They’re an absolutely amazing team. Their game is an unbelievable banger. And it’s not like they just found a golden pot of money. You know, not only do they have a killer team, it very much seems that in Kepler, they found an exceptional publisher, one who, seeing them as an amazing team, decided to back them as much as they could. Everyone won. The team won, the publisher won, and we won. It’s exactly what we want to see, a publisher really acing its job. But today, you’re going to see the other side of that survivorship bias. And even how a sector of games funding has fallen, literally, this is not hyperbole, has fallen by billions of dollars. Yeah, it doesn’t get talked about. Most people don’t even know. Meet Alzar, Radiant Echos. It’s a 2024 Kickstarter project from Studio Chameleia. They were a global team of ex Ubisoft and indie devs who set out to make their dream game a they say vibrant tribute to JRPG classics specifically to Golden Sun and Final Fantasy 10. Obviously FF10 was a humongous inspiration for Expedition 33 and of course also to the best JRPG of all time, Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. And even better, they managed to secure Motoy Sakaraba for the soundtrack. Now he is a big name in this genre. Yes, in JRPGs you may also know him for uh this little tune that’s called Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls. So, you’ve heard his work. And looking at the game, it’s a very distinct art style um based in southern France. It it looks gorgeous. And if they were to pitch this game today, you would half expect them to just say, “Hey, we’re the next Expedition 33. Money us now.” Of course, over on Kickstarter, people seem to like it. They donated over €300,000 euro and that is far beyond the campaign’s hundred,000 euro target. It was easily one of 2024’s most successful Kickstarter campaigns. Yeah, fast forward a year and here we are with development being over. The studio broke the news via Kickstarter update and it is a grim situation. So basically they ran out of money, they entered liquidation April 28th and nothing is going to be released beyond the demo trailer which you know we can all go and watch and uh feel sad about. Unsurprisingly, the Kickstarter backers were bloody well furious. They had seen polished trailers for this game, and in a way, it’s almost a victim of looking so good. When you look at the trailers, it really does look like a fully formed vision that looks amazing. And people believed in the 2026 release date. These are people who thought they were backing a real game. And the thing is, they they were, but they may not have understood all of the intricacies of the funding. Basically, funding goal succeeded three times over. Obviously, the game is going to come out. Now, Chameleia did make it worse. They had late backing remain open until February, which very much made it look like, you know, in hindsight, you guys probably saw the writing in the wall, yet you were still taking people’s money. And then, by the time they communicated, it seems the whole thing is beyond saving. The company’s in liquidation. But more than anything, this is the real disconnect that the public gave them €300,000. So, how could they not deliver? How much does an indie game actually cost? So, €300,000 is serious money, but it’s also nowhere near enough for this game, the game that they planned. It is not enough. Not even close. Now, their closure announcement did reveal a timeline where we see the development started in 2021. It was funded by personal savings, by Microsoft grants, and by angel investors. And those funds took them to basically half of their budgeted development costs. And of course, that’s just development costs. There’s also marketing and all the other things that they would need. So, the studio did what indies do. They went to crowdfunding. And not just for the money, but to show investor interest. You see, whenever you see Kickstarters, what I want you to keep in mind is that they’re almost all, well, very often anyway, not anywhere near the full budget for a game. And to better understand this, we can take a look at a massive success. That’s Bloodstained. It’s uh an indie game from Castlevania producer Koji Igrashi and it set a 500k goal. That goal represented 10% of the total planned budget. And the reason why is really simple. It’s to demonstrate real tangible commercial interest. Basically, as you know, money follows money often into a black hole where it all gets destroyed. But right, if you’re able to fund 500 grand, that’s pretty damn good because little can validate your game concept as well as actually getting backing from your target customers. Now, of course, Bloodstained wildly surpassed that goal, right? Like well over 5 million. But what matters today is that is the funding model as is basically normal right now. And a lot of that is because for the scale of some of these games, most Kickstarter numbers that you could realistically hit are just not going to be enough money. So here with Chameleia, it’s essentially the same idea, but with a little bit less star power. Now, let’s just think through the basics here. €300,000 and a team of 14 people. If that was to support them through a year, that would be tough, right? It would put them well below average French wages, but across two years, the time that they would need to hit their 2026 release target, that’s basically just not possible. And the thing is, it never was the plan. Again, in Kickstarter, it rarely is like that. The whole point is that, well, with an investor demo, which they were building, and substantial commercial interest, that the next step would be the usual one in our industry, to secure a publisher. And for a game like this that really did have visuals that cut through with proven commercial success, right? Real world market validation, you normally would expect a publisher to pick it up. But even with that being the normal next step and like really them being in a pretty damn strong position with that in mind, well, the reality is these are not normal times. Okay, you’ve heard us talk about this stuff before in the channel. Basically, the facts are this. Gaming funding is at its lowest point in 5 years. I hear this from my friends who are like, you know, over in big AAA land in the States. I hear it from people absolutely everywhere. It appears in like the the fan tips email that we have. It’s in the news everywhere. It’s it’s just it’s goddamn bad times right now. Take a look at this. This is from Crunchbase. And Crunchbase is a site that’s all about venture capital money. And uh the line is not going up, guys. It’s going down. And remember, this is VC. So, as much as you’ll see VCs actually, you know, invest into some pretty banging games, in many cases, it is also the ghouls who are chasing mobile games, sports betting, crypto titans, and all of that fun. So, that’s bad. Even though that’s where all of the, you know, big money is going. What if you want to make a normal video game like this one or like Expedition 33? Yeah, good luck. It’s not going to be easy, especially if it’s your first published game, even if you are literally a bunch of veterans. And that’s because in the current market, even proven teams with historic track records are not being able to maintain funding through 2024. The evidence for this is uh pretty simple. It’s the massive graveyard that keeps on getting bigger week by week. Now, remember that in the situation of Bloodstained, they still needed to convince investors even though it was from uh you know, a producer of Castlevania. Suffice to say, things have not gotten better since. We can talk about some hard numbers, and we’re going to use Playstack for this. You’ve probably not heard of them. They’re a relatively new, not super talked about publisher, but they did publish Bolatro and Abiotic Factor, both which did really well. So, they know indie games. And speaking to game developer, they revealed something pretty damn crucial to us that they get thousands of pitches yearly, not hundreds of pitches, thousands of pitches. And that’s just one company. And the way it basically goes is their email will consistently being mini gunned with pitches. And then at say uh Gamescoms and stuff, well, they’re going to be in the other side of Gamescom, the one that you can’t get into with your normal ticket. That’s because you got regular Gamescom, which is for, you know, consumers. It’s for the marketing of games. But then you’ll have the business side of Gamescom. It actually happens across different days. It’s got different tickets. And basically, it’s a hell of a lot of just people speed dating with other people to try and make deals happen. So, basically, there’s a lot of people who uh are basically saying, “Hello, money me now. I want to make a video game. And in the example of PlayStack, for all the thousands of pitches that they get, they’re uh not really publishing that many games. So success is extremely hard. It has in fact got quite a bit harder. But it isn’t just a numbers game. In the interview, they say that success comes whenever developers know their market gap, which essentially is trying to go for the sort of thing that could appear to be an outsized success, something like Bilatro. Now, worse still, at least for games like this, the funding quantities have also collapsed. And I’m going to directly quote play stack here. We are seeing budget asks into the millions. Would we prefer four games at 300K or one game at 1.2 million? Now, here’s the funny thing, right? Years back, I was seeing publishers pushing up budgets. Even publishers like Playstack, actually, they were pushing up way higher budgets than that. And uh basically, that’s what we were seeing, right? There’s a lot of encouraging people to aim a little bit higher, bring in more money, it was a very different time, right? Uh it it really was a time of plenty, but obviously there’s a hell of a graveyard of just games that appear in Steam and even if they have amazing reviews, they only have 300 of them and not that many sales. So, what we’ve essentially seen is that the riskreward math has fundamentally changed and it’s like placed that come off as some pack of evil bastards. They don’t seem to be the kind of publisher who are only interested in taking, you know, their cut at the expense of their developers. There’s a lot of publishers who very much are that. Maybe we’ll get to talk about some of those very bad deals that I know a few games have got, but can’t really talk about because it it breaks things that you hear in the grapevine. But man, there’s a few publishers that deserve a skewering. And someday I hope that we’re able to get some real documents out there so that uh you know it can be actually reported on in a way that is responsible, sourced and and helpful. Anyway, enough that tangent, but I do want to keep in this video just so that you get a bit of a tone, a bit of a feeling of the sorts of situations that development studios end up in. There’s so many situations where, you know, the public may be very furious at a development studio, but in reality, they’re binded by non-disparagement agreements, and really, it’s the publisher that the problems are coming from. Now, Playstack, from everything I’ve heard, are absolutely not one of those publishers. But even though they do appear to be one of the good actors out there, well, they still need to invest sustainably. And whenever they say, “What would you rather have? One game, one big risk for 1.2 2 million or four games at 300K. Any of us would say the latter. Indeed, when we look at the humongous game budgets out there, what do we end up saying? Man, how many good games could you have made for the cost of that bloated AAA nightmare monstrosity? And this is where we get to a problem for games like the centerpiece of today’s video. There’s a fundamental issue, and that is that if your game cannot get funding support in the first place, then you’re not really going to be making it for anyone. It is absurdly hard to get projects off the ground. It was hard in the past, but these days it is harder than ever, at least via more traditional means. So, even though Expedition 33 did absolutely amazing with a small team, a reasonable budget, a hell of a publisher being able to back them up, not everyone’s able to get that publisher. It’s legitimately hard. There’s only so many release slots. There’s only so many publishers. And whenever I flashed up the sort of connections thing for, you know, Expedition 33, that’s more just to say it’s kind of hard to oneshot that, you do actually need to have built up connections. So getting games off the ground is extremely hard. And if a game that is actually doing so much right by the laws of expedition 33, you know, small team, XAA, actual veterans, people involved in the project who are tied to amazing titles in the form of the musician that they’ve worked with, even when all of that is counting for you, when you’re even market validated with real customers, real money to the tune of three times your asking amount on Kickstarter if they can’t do it. Well, [ __ ] the situation was hard for everyone else. So, what does it mean to you? Well, the knock-on effect is that all of this creates inherent limitations on the types of games that can be backed, right? Because if those budgets are coming down, that will actually influence what sort of thing gets made. So, if you want an expedition 33, you simply just need more money. But to get that money, well, you need proof because people don’t just hand you a big bag of money without proof. Now, ideally, maybe you’ll earn enough money from the last game you made to build an investor demo for your next game. Maybe you’ll eek out a few more months in tax credits or some regional government funding, things that most studios do. Expedition 33 is an example of getting regional government funding. But it doesn’t always work. What’s happened is that so many people have have done all of this and really have reached the bar where in the market of say a decade ago, they almost certainly would have got published or at the very least had far better chances. But now those goalposts have changed. Common wisdoms that were normal in the industry have changed. Funding limits have fell even for the big, you know, big money man money from the money men and their I don’t know all their money, the VCs as reported by Crunchb. Just look how much that has fallen. But what I told you was somehow worse than that because it actually kind of is. You see, what’s also happened is the point at which publishers are willing to commit funds has moved further and further and further and further back. There’s the odd story about, you know, developers in the past having an amazing pitch for a game and somehow being able to get a deal. But nowadays, it’s absolutely not like that. It hasn’t been like that for years, but it is it has just got harder. you need to be further and further and further along in your overall development process to actually get to the point where a publisher will be willing to commit funds. And that means that the sorts of lean prototypes that could have seen a team through to funding, those are often no longer enough. And sometimes publishers effectively do just want an alpha build of a game before they’re willing to toss their money into the pot. And that’s for obvious reasons. Gaming got into quite a bubble. We’re not living in a land of just 0% interest rates for, you know, years upon years. The the finances have tightened. And the further away from launch in both presentation and content and tech, the more risk that there is. And you know, it’s kind of funny. As much as you could pull a Warren Buffett and say, “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.” Well, that’s kind of hard to do when it’s your publishers’s money, your job being on the line. Perhaps Kepler did just that. They knew that it was a pretty tight market that a lot of others were fearful. But they saw the team behind Expedition 33 and thought, “No, this is one we need to double down on. That’s the thing we need to do.” And maybe if more publishers were in a good enough state of financial health to do the same that this other JRPG made by a small team of veterans, some Exobisoft, some French, just like Expedition 33, then maybe it would have survived. But as it stands, the industry has just not been able to take a well- validated game like that that certainly looks to be a banger for its target audience and uh systemically find the money to support it, which ultimately means that you and me are going to lose. And we only know this because unfortunately Kickstarter money went kaput. Now, whenever you put money into a Kickstarter, you do acknowledge that that sort of thing could happen. And taking a look at this game’s funding journey, yeah, people put their personal savings into it. I in no way think this is a rugpull or a scam or anything like that. I think it’s that financing is [ __ ] hard and right now it’s harder than ever. Meaning that those playing by the rules of 5 years ago are finding that they’re no longer sufficient. It makes me sad because it does mean we’ll get fewer games and the sorts of games that will be made well will look just a little bit different.