Notch backed away from funding Psychonauts 2 after learning cost would be $18 million
By Tim Colwill on February 6, 2013 at 2:52 pm
Minecraft creator Notch once famously tweeted at Tim Schaefer, saying that he’d be happy to help fund Psychonauts 2 for “a couple of million”. Well, according to Notch, that couple of million turned out to be more in the order of $18 million — and as such, the famous indie developer is out.
“I somewhat naively thought ‘a couple of million’ was two million. I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily,” wrote Notch in a Reddit thread.
“Turns out they wanted 18 million dollars, haha. I don’t have the time at the moment to even try to get educated enough to make an eighteen million dollar deal. Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing.”
“I’ve made one private investment into a game so far, at 100k, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”
No Psychonauts 2 for us, then — at least not for a while.
Source: PCGamesN
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Stop the presses.
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Gosh, then he would have no money to go on a holiday every week.
$18m? What in the flying fuck.
I couldn’t agree more. Fancy someone offering to help you fund your game and then you turning around and saying, sure that’ll be $18 mil thanks!
The first game was around $15m I believe, so it’s not really that surprising.
GTA V is rumoured to be up around $140m
artfuldodger,
kinkykel,
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not. $18 million is a pretty small amount of money to make something like Psychonauts 2. The first one cost $13 million to make almost a decade ago, there’s no way you could make anything even remotely similar to the to first on a budget of a couple of million.
Game development is expensive. People need to be paid salaries.
If a game takes 2 years to make, and there’s 60 people employed in your studio (double fine has about that), and each employee is only taking a average wage ($70k), that’s 8 million in compensation alone, which easily doubles to 16 million when talking about total employee cost (benefits, holidays, medicare, super etc). That’s not including renting office space and equipment. AND that’s before any sort of publishing/marketing effort, which adds another few million into the mix even when doing it on the cheap.
A million is a lot of money to an individual, but it’s not much for a company that has to pay employees.
For a full 3d game that’s nothing $18 million is a really tiny development cost.
its a bit risky given the first one tanked. That said though, its not like Notch is having money trouble.
gammad,
Again though, Notch didn’t get rich making bad investments. Psychonauts is a very niche market and considering the first game being a major commercial failure, not even selling half a million copies as of 2012, expecting him to roll the dice with 18 million on the line is pretty damn brash if you ask me.
You can say what you like about Notch but I think he made the right choice here.
I absolutely loved Psychonauts, would love to see a sequel.
Let me reiterate, $18m when the game is meant to be an indie development… which clearly this is not. When you’re talking that type of money you really should be looking at a proper investors, publishers, etc. because you honestly can’t expect others to pony up that type of cash.