How is Starbound being funded?

I juuust did a bit of math.

14 developers are on this project. There are about 16k people on the Starbound CHronicle Subscription. Assuming those people all buy the game when it comes out (And why not? Several seem happy to buy several copies) This means each developer will get a bonus of roughly $25k. If spread evenly. Without the publishing figured in, because I have no idea how that works. And the labor and material costs.

Yeah, Chucklefish will be far from rich after this concludes. Still that IS a 25 grand they may be guaranteed to have as well as more to come due to being in Steam... The life of a developer for new brands of games is never over...
It also kind of makes me wonder about how legitimately buying Wanderlust (Only a few dollars of its sale price really goes to Starbound Im supposing, as Yeti Trunk STILL needs to profit) is helping the Starbound devs when so few dollars are going into buying Wanderlust to begin with...

 

Judging by terrarias sales so far (2 million), I am guessing starbound will also sell around that much, since it's a product of the same genre and better quality. However let's say they will sell around 500000 copies. At lowest they will charge 10 dollars for each, steam has a cut of 20~% (I heard that kongregate has a cut of 30%, and steam has a considerably lower cut). That means they will make at least 4 million dollars, even if 25% of that are marketing/development/etc costs, that's still 3 million dollars for a team of 14 people, which is very damn nice! Eventually with all the sales it should reach the numbers of terraria if not higher, so they are going to be rich.

 

I sure hope they don't give it away like notch did; it's a nice sentiment, but I want my favorite developers to have at least enough to retire!

 

Nah. carrier rocket penguins

On topic, yeah, I guess they're just living off savings.

 

Personally, I think they'll make a lot more than that. There's no way to know the future of course, but Starbound is in its infancy as far as mainstream knowledge is concerned. We all found our way to this forum basically through word of mouth. There is virtually no press for the game right now, and no real advertising being done. The sales they are "guaranteed" from us are just the tip of the iceberg. We're the hardest of the hardcore fans, but there is a LOT of untapped potential out there waiting to be explored. Once the game gets a release date, or even just gets into beta, I predict the buzz on this sucker will explode.

In short, I think it's a good bet that you'll need another digit to describe the final number of Starbound sales... perhaps even two.

 

But my point is that if the Devs can't survive until the game's release, then everything will be for naught. I think they'll need another source of income to just get them through these hard times, and, with enough funding, they might even get out of it loan-free too.

 

I just think they don't WANT any... During all of the gameplay demonstrations, I start throwing money at the screen, but nothing happens...

 

To get something, you must give something.
(For example, to get Starbound I will give my immortal soul.)

But seriously, that is how business works (or even worked at the good old days): you're investing your money, your sweat and blood into something, and then you get profits. THEN is a keyword. Many people today are forgetting of this somehow. And thus we got a world financial crisis and such things.

I'm glad to see theres some people who remember what is real work. And I think they deserved a decent reward.

 

Fry is now funding the entire dev team

 

Now the question is, who is funding Fry?

 

14??? Did they start cloning themselves? Chucklefish is 7 people: Tiy, Kyren, OmnipotentEntity, Bartwe, Rho, GeorgeV, and Legris. Other people who have worked on the game (music, concept art, etc) are most likely either paid on contract or will have a much smaller cut of the profit from the game than the main developers.

 

Unless I'm misinterpreting something, Chucklefish is composed by fourteen people, as can be seen in their website: http://chucklefish.org/

 

I guess they help themselves untill they're selling the actual game.

 

That's where I pulled my list of people from. There are 7 portraits in the house, who else is there?

 

Ahem.
Have you seen a big yellow arrow on the right?

 

Actually with my browser window size, the info popups cover up that arrow... I actually haven't ever heard of half the people on the second page. Are they all actively involved in Starbound development?

 

For sure.

 

That only makes the situation feels like a rouge-like game, where the devs lose everything if they somehow lose the funds. No respawn, no second lives, and definitely no cloth hangers to increase your firing rate.

 

Yes, I believe so. Mollygos is quite active in the forums, for instance.

 

I believe fetalstar is the only one that isn't really active in SB development. Makes sense though since SB is all pixel art. I'm pretty sure that if it's not pixel art she did it though.