Does anyone know the developers total budget for this game?

Development
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I’ve been having a discussion with a friend for a while now on game development and budgets and was wondering. what’s stonehearths budget? does anyone know the full number? and does anyone have a clue on how much was spent of said budget so far? the kick starter showed 750k for their total backing earned form their campaign. on top of that they charge 25$? (i forget) for early access on steam. on TOP of that they got money from Riot buying them so i’m sure that money went into their budget for development of the game. I was curious what the hard numbers are.

the reason being was my friends a hardcore star citizen fan and tries to justify the 141m total budget they have right now for the game given the lengthy development cycle it’s been through so far and i’m trying to compare stonehearth to star cit given it’s had half the development, more completed game content put into the game so far, and most likely a fraction of star cit’s total budget to boot. i’d like to know all i can about this subject seeing as i myself wish to work for a game developer one day.

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@Kitkat_Matt: I don’t believe that we’ll be able to provide the numbers you are looking for, sorry :disappointed:. While the Kickstarter is public information, the number of Steam sales and the deal with Riot are not (even as a moderator I’m not privy to that level of detail). We were asked a few times at PAX how Steam sales were, and the team declined to give specifics, simply explaining that sales fluctuate, particularly around sales, holidays, and well-known streamers playing.

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We are all know you are working on the game so much, but how much time it take to finish the alpha?

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well for starters. who are you asking? because neither me nor the jomaxro person who replied to me are working on the game.

and secondly, why are you hijacking a thread related to budget to ask about the time frame that the game will come out of alpha? please don’t be rude by changing the subject of the thread to something else.

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the numbers aren’t exact, but give a good approximation.
25*200k from steam + 750k from ks = 5.75m
backers on kickstarter most likely have the game on steam, so they’re counted double. sales not accounted for. people that for some reason didn’t get a steam key through humble not counted.

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I think it’s a fair guess to say that the money raised by the KickStarter is long gone.

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total budget = money spent on development when the game is done
so the ks money is included in the total budget.

but yes, i assume the money from kickstarter has been used by now. not that that’s a problem now they have a decent income

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I think it’s a problem for KickStarter backers, specifically those who only backed at the release level, Linux and macOS backers. As you say, StoneHearth is being sold in early acess at a price that is more associated with full retail price appears to be doing nicely.

As Team StoneHeart seem very unwilling to put any timeframe or milestones back into the project, I fear that some of those who backed StoneHearth earliest may be waiting the longest to get anything out of their pledge. That’s despite, of course, being part of the group that Radiant were so grateful to for enabling StoneHearth to happen.

Sucks to be us, eh?

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wait, people who pledged 15-25 on ks can’t play it yet?
if so, that’s a real bummer

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Hm, i find it quite rude to use such aplications to track a game’s sales and such (talking of the steamspy thing up there)
I believe a game’s team has rights to have private information about sales and income, as they are often big parts of marketing and motivation for fans and the devs and showing it is almost always a bad idea since it makes the devs ‘LOOK’ like they have a ton of money, when in reality, it’s like,… income, making the game feel more like some sort of sell-off, when in reality, the money is really needed, and showing money tends to make people bitter in general

I’m no developer, but i wouldn’t say there’s a ‘budget’ as a big concept here, not only do the numbers only become real after the development is finished, i’d expect a company to set a rough budget to a game first, and cut the game mid-way if the game’s development isn’t going anywhere, for now, development has been strong, and since the team still has support of Riot, i’d expect the ‘budget’ to somewhat rise as the company sees more potential in it.
In other words, it’d be fluctuating

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firstly using something like steamspy isn’t rude, it’s not even illegal. if you were a student doing a research paper on PC gaming and it’s influence on the overall gaming market you’d NEED steamspy for context when bringing up specific games for examples and references. so it’s completely fine to use it in my opinion ESPECIALLY if the developer is attempting to hide the facts in order to inflate their own numbers to make it seem as tho their games more popular than it really is. it’s important to be transparent and steamspy makes them be such.

sales are not private information in general as every company has yearly public fiscal reports talking about losses and gains, sony and microsoft on a yearly basis releases their total units sold in order to try and one up one another and even if they didn’t it would be easy enough to find out through some research on your own side to figure out the exact numbers. i feel like you’re taking this personally for some reason.

and every game has a budget, big broad concepts don’t prevent them from creating a general round about number for how much they might need to make the game complete. it would be naive to believe that a team who has a long term plan also doesn’t have a budget for said long term plan.and by the by…the “rough budget” is the current budget still. the games development is strong which means there would be no need to cut the budget anywhere. and given that riot owns them now the budget wouldn’t be fluctuating, more likely just simply rising over time.a budget only DROPS when there is an issue and they are forced to narrow the scope of their vision which they haven’t done yet. fluctuating implies rising and dropping depending on the situation, that isn’t the case with stonehearth.

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knowing they had that much income already should be very positive news to anyone who owns the game. if they had little money perhaps they’d abandon the project, which has happened with other ks games. i hope the game keeps selling well, so the development can continue for a long time so we get more features.

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All Backers could have gotten a free steam key the moment it went EA and or getting it through humble. Those that choose to play are doing so at no extra cost or waiting.

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Ligality aside, rude is quite subjective, and i found i a little rude to use it since the team has stated that the do not want to talk about sales and for good reasons, suddenly popping in and showing a page with estemated sales and profits in my eyes are not quite good of manners
(Its like a person says “i don’t want to talk in detail about my business progress” and someone from the side pops in and shows statistics of the buisness the person owns and reveales it all, in front of them)

Even it it isn’t illigal, and yes, players do have some right in information, but so does the game in privacy, even if you could just do some digging and find it legally some people are either not willing to dig in, or they respect their privacy and wishes

I bet many people in the forums who were curiouse on sales probably did do some digging even if it isn’t steamspy, but we never talked about it here, why? Because the developers said that they didn’t want to talk about it, and i think most of us respeced that

And this is a discussion website, so i, nor the devs have power to stop you from using such sources, and we all have different views on privacy, for me, privacy is personal, the person(or team/company) has the rights to keep things private if it’s not vital to the consumers, for instance, if a company is shutting down, they should let the consumers know, they shouldn’t pretend like they still exist. Same for something like medical side-effects, they really should let you know the risks.
But the ‘privacy’ i’m talking here is on the company side, because you can’t tell a person to publicly show where they live, saying “you can find it legally if you do some digging, why do you hide it anyway?”

And i’m always on the side of the defender of information and the developer/owner, i’m on the side where information is to be kept private if wanted, if you hack a company to draw statistics(illegally here) you are not a vigilante or information justice, you are a theif and a criminal to me

And i understand that we all have differnt opinions and views when it comes to information privacy, maybe you think since you bought a product, you have the rights to have detailed information on how the priducs is going? Well if that’s you, i have no say on how you think,
for me, i do not since we didn’t have a contract/agreement to say that i’ll have all data, for me, if they aren’t obligated to do it, i have no right to know it, i have questions, and they don’t have a responsibility to answer them, they have manners and common sense to follow

Kay, i think if i go any further i’ll de-rail the post too much

As for budgets, yes, i don’t have much experience and i agree with you if you’re talking about the ‘current’ budget, all i was saying is that the overal budget could change

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My apologies for my mistake, anyone who backed to a game level in the KickStarter does have access to the alpha.

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Quick Public Service Announcement: If you are a Kickstarter backer at the $15 tier or greater and do not have access to the game, please check out this help topic for instructions on using the Humble Store Key Resender. If that does not work, please message @moderators for further assistance.

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*Every company that is publicly traded on the stock market.

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Quick Public Service Announcement

Quick Public Service Announcement: If you are a Kickstarter backer with access to a Windows environment at the $15 tier or greater and do not have access to the game, please check out this help topic for instructions on using the Humble Store Key Resender.

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