What’s it all about?
As I mentioned in the previous article, we attended a Game Camps Visby in October. In addition to the mentoring sessions proving very valuable, Emelie held a presentation which won the company 10k€ to further the development of the game. Since then we’ve had several discussions regarding what we can and what we can’t do with those funds going forward, which I’m now going to tell you about!
What we can do
We can use these funds to help us market the game, letting us do things like attending conventions, being more liberal in demo product to potential key personalities etc. Things that we haven’t been able to do before due to it not being great short-term, but that we should because of the long-term gains.
These 10k€ also can help us attract an investor, which would open plenty more doors if we did end up getting one. It is a bit on the low end for this purpose, but it still is a significant improvement from previously.
What we can’t do
Work full time on the project – It would be great to be able to work full-time with state of wonder, allowing us to shorten our timeline significantly. Being able to work more closely with game stores across the country, hosting events ourselves personally, would let us kickstart interest in the game in a way we currently are not able to. This additional time would also let us be significantly more thorough in our playtesting, leading to a better experience for you, the players, in the end. However, 10k€ falls short of the estimated60k€ required to keep the lights on for two developers for a year.
We also can’t really use the funds to increase the scale of our print orders, to get the benefits of bulk printing. Currently, we’re in a phase where the benefits of just increasing our orders by 2-3x would mostly be eaten up by shipping costs. If we had the ability to increase our orders by 10x though, that’s when we would see the benefits scale well enough that we could lower the retail price of the product. For that though, we need to increase the interest of our product, so that we are able to reliably sell that product to recoup the investment. The 10k€ isn’t enough to do that kind of investment at this point in time.
Going Forward
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like 10k€ will change much. We will be able to reach out more, building a community more aggressively than we would be able to before. It also lets us do small improvements that require small monetary commitments, such as test samples of different printing processes for our future expansions.
That’s all for today! More about what’s coming up in the next devlog coming two weeks from now! Catch you then!