Exzore: The Rising Kickstarter Campaign Unsuccessful

The Kickstarter campaign for Tiny Shark Interactive’s open-world RPG Exzore: The Rising has concluded with a total of £10,810 pledged out of the required £50,000. However this doesn’t necessarily mean that the game will never see the light of day. This campaign update explains that Exzore is being privately funded and the Kickstarter funds were supposed to help speed things up and cover the costs of hiring additional contractors. Here are a few paragraphs about the game’s budget and pricing:

If you think “it will take more than just £50,000 to make this game!” – Yes, you are absolutely right!

It is going to take us around £500,000 to make this game. We are being funded by a private investor, and he had promised that he would fund entire development.

To improve the game’s quality and reduce development time a little, in addition to our in-house team, we decided to outsource a few of our assets (like voice acting, SFX, particle effects, etc.) to specialized individual freelancers, reputed art-houses and music studios. After development, we have packaging, distribution and marketing costs too.

To cover the costs of these contractors, distribution and marketing, we asked our investor if he could invest £100,000 more. As our investor is very new to the games industry, he needed some confidence to invest an additional £100K. So, he proposed that if we could raise half this amount on Kickstarter, he would in-fact increase his investment – more than how much we asked for; so that we could hire a few more team members and make the game better. If we raise a bigger amount in Kickstarter, we can still pump that money into development, to make the game much bigger and better by hiring more experienced team members, and also purchasing 3rd party tools that will enhance the aesthetics of our game. Of course, we are also very excited to reach and fulfil our stretch goals.

To sum it up, on an event of the successful Kickstarter campaign, we are looking at having around £750,000 to develop the game with good creative freedom.

Wait, isn’t £500,000 still less to develop an RPG?

Yes, but our development costs are significantly reduced because:

• 1) Geographical location of the development team has a huge impact on the development costs. You see, our entire art team is located in India and this geographical location reduces our development costs by about 40%. Let us give a small example: According to glassdoor.co.uk, the average salary of a 3D Artist in the UK is £29,000/year, while our Lead 3D artist in India gets approximately £9500/year. This is actually a decent salary in India, which is a big advantage to us. Likewise, office rentals and other expenses like the internet are comparatively much cheaper in India than in the UK.
• 2) We have great deals on development tools, hardware, software and middleware. Due to our Independent AAA nature, most third-party companies and hardware retailers we negotiated with, were kind enough to support us by giving a great discount on their products. This helps us a lot in cost reductions.

Information about the game pricing

We want to be completely open to our backers and gamers. Now, you are aware that we are spending comparatively less to develop our game. All these genuine efforts we put to reduce the development costs should be beneficial to you, our backers and gamers too! That’s why we are planning to price the game lesser than usual RPGs that are in the market. For this Kickstarter campaign, we are pricing our early bird copies for just £15 and after that, all other digital copies is going to cost you £20.