Do you need funding? I'd bet if you organized some kind of fundraising, and showcased some of the game dev you've done, people would throw money at it and you could work on it full time and/or hire some people to help get it done.
its not as simple as that and may not result in a successful project or me even working on it when it completes (e.g EA and Visceral)
Currently
- Most Art and 3rd party assets have licences for me to use in complete games and promotional content as a single seat(1 dev) a couple pre 2016 have multi seat but not most as they cost quite a bit more
- a showcase is easy vs a stable backend framework and client which is whats needed for game play and multiple games
- possible unrealistic expectations by funders either corporate or social exerting unnecessary pressure just to reach a best guess schedule date which often has negative effects on game play
- meetings/training/familiarization can take ages and people still might not stay for whatever reason so can get caught in a loop and little real work on solutions is done just talk and same old stuff again and again
- raise more than $100k and also licence changes for unity engine(tiny amount really for a game even a mobile one ~ 2 devs 1 year *most AAA large team and 3-5 years)
- pretty much worked full time doing game dev during 2015 and towards end of that year into 2016 spent most of that time getting the skills my ex team mates had just so things could continue
- much higher taxation with formal structure inc time needed for accounting also if age > 3 years has even more issues with paperwork and accounts at least here in UK
- If people you work with trust to do their part leave for whatever reason you can be left either redoing/reworking or a total rewrite which is what I did after Andrew left BZ this really screws plans/timeframes up
- if you run out of money project fails and people tend to go own ways rather than tough it out till its complete or at least meets most of its requirements
- limited data to properly cost the expected revenue and CU overheads which could mean funding is short or too much interesting interview here
"The actual process of generating projections - which EA uses to set marketing budgets and judge success - is incredibly opaque, which I think most devs found frustrating. We can't translate our passion into a spreadsheet."
"Dead Space 2, cost $60 million to make and a further $60 million to market" later elaborating that the development budget specifically was closer to $47m. "Once you account for the sizable cut from retailers, distributors and more, 4 million sales is not enough to recoup these costs."
"Survival horror is hard, Horror games in general are expensive to make and hard to sell."
So I will continually reevaluate as time goes on but right now Self Funded works and fits in with what I am currently doing, latter stages specially distribution things change but not close to that right now so does not have an effect on funding sources
The further I get along the line more data can collect to properly value to project which ultimately will result in correct amount(at least a lot closer) for expectations and budgets when asking for funding (ideal would be minimal funding needed for infrastructure to scale with most spent on marketing and basically all initial 3rd party assets/R&D/early work done and paid for e.g Chicken before egg)
Originally I did seek funding and it came down to losing controlling % of any formal entity + tight time frames + penalties for over budget/time if I had gone that way the amount looking back was far too little and time frames impossible let alone the stress for not meeting them
Social side of funding sources yeah plenty over the years have raised what they asked for and sometimes even much more but many of them still failed as they could not make it work at scale or it was much more expensive once they tried to roll out/release/distribute/production, I am hoping for at least the skill to repeat until I hit a gem without the strings that come with fundraising too early.
I do think at the right time in the project fundraising can be used as part of the marketing and to help fund that part of the process at least from a social side and that can then in turn help have a stronger hand when forming contracts as a company with other companies and not a weak hand with a begging bowl and dire need to pay staff like many projects/companies fail with
on a positive note the games industry as a whole does seem to be focusing on even more loot boxes and microtransactions systems/game mechanics in most games on mostly all platforms these days so what I have been working on is still very relevant and no clear winner/solution plenty trying even some raising funds to be where I am already