Shadow of the Eternals

Hi all,

How do people feel about this one? I loved Eternal Darkness, and would love to revisit that whole mythos, but in the context of this announcement, I just recently read about how much of a problem Denis Dyack has been.

That coupled with my general unease about consumers assuming both the risks of production and consumption while the company gets to enjoy the profits of the finished product has me kind of twiggy about this.

Shadow of the Eternals

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Shake it, Quake it, SPACE KABOOM

If you willingly give money to Dyack you are an idiot of proportions I can't quantify with text.

Come on, that's being a little silly don't you think? The opportunity cost of $5 over the expected value of a new ED? You're going to say that concluding either way on that ROI is ineffably stupid?

I was hoping for more substantive responses.

Things that I'd been thinking about are the fact that Dyack is the chief creative officer. He's balanced by a CEO and a COO. All of the officers are going to be participating in the development of the game.

I don't know what the corporate structure was like at Silicon, but it sounded like Dyack had sole power there. This might address those problems.

The CEO has indicated that Nintendo's been supportive of the project, so it doesn't sound as if IP issues will be cropping up.

The idea of an episodic game is disturbing, but the retail price will be $5 per episode, which translates into $60 for a game. Going by their estimate of a 2-4 hour play time per episode, that seems like a fairly standard length adventure game.

From the company's perspective, I can see how crowdfunding the initial production costs followed by ongoing production costs is a much lower risk proposition. They are not committing as much capital up front, which, given the size of the company, is not surprising. Additionally, doing crowdfunding of ongoing production costs in the episodic format allows them to gauge continuing demand and adjust the product to the market.

The individual risk to the consumer is effectively the spread on the quality of the product and any donation over the retail price. These are fairly immaterial amounts of money. I mean, that's the whole point of crowd-funding these projects to begin with. The only part I'm sour about is that it's not actually equity, so I don't get a proportional share of profits for the risk that I am assuming, but whatever. Again it's immaterial.

I guess that's where I've landed. It's higher risk given Dyack, but there are potentially ameliorating controls in place, and the amount of money in question is insignificant, so why not? I don't need to min-max my cash flows.

And also, Diss, I agree that was pretty ridiculous.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

That's awesome. Thank you for sharing it. The drama is delicious.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.