LunarWave

Eco It's an amazing game focused on a community interaction (with other real people) to overcome a common goal while avoiding ruining the game world.

Maybe not today but tomorrow? Add me anyway if you want, The_Luna ingame

Nope, and never. I am in the web development industry so that would require me to quit my job and change literally 99% of what I do. Doubt it would even be me after that. Also, your info is already out there, and it's not going to be easy to drop off. Even just by being on this forum, you're feeding some of your info to Google and by extension, forum owners. It's claimed to be unidentifiable, but some info is still recorded. It is going to take a lot of effort to truly drop off, and then then, what's the real point? You lose out on a lot nowadays, and potentially put yourself in more risk by not getting critical information in time.

Steam and HB do take a cut. But it's a cost that comes after you sold a copy, not before. Unless they based their price point on some magical guesswork, they know what they're getting. As for the rest of the message.. Yeah, until I see the sources for all those claims, I'm gonna ignore it. Show me at least estimated production costs, celebrity commissions, some financial data and then we can clearly see whether it's a flop. Right now, all the data I got points me to that they're doing alright, so I guess thank you for making me dig that up.

You're missing that they didn't exactly had to give that budget back to anyone. The copies were sold for money. People didn't give them money as charity, or investment, they got something they valued in return.They are not obliged to spend it all on production, and part of any crowdfunding budget goes to fulfill the backers' rewards. What they are obliged to do is to deliver on the campaign promises, and refund people if they have a problem (and even that is not that straightforward). Distribution costs of the game are basically free, so they made quite a lot just selling copies and perks that would mostly use a few hours of teams' time, not their financial resources. If they didn't go over the budget, they already made it back. If they did go over their budget (which might as well be the case), I want to know exact numbers before knowing how much they made and how commercially successful it was. If they spent twice the budget, then your comments are on-point, if less than 50%, they're in black already.

I don't see how campaign doesn't add up to to the budget calculations. Copies were sold, not given away for free. Money were flowing from users to the studio, so it must be taken in consideration. I don't know their actual finances, and until they release some official statement regarding that, or their budget numbers, all this is just a speculation based on the limited info we have.

It had budget, and we got a game. Project is a success as far as I'm concerned. You might be forgetting that 2/3 of projects don't even make it that far. Market-wise, an early launch went quite well in my opinion. Very few games even reach those sales, and in current Steam conditions, that's a pretty good place to be in. If they play their cards right, it might rise to the top when it gets an official release. Also, your estimates are off by a factor of 10. They made around 300k at the current state + what money they got from the campaign. Might not cover everything but not "nothing".

You seem to be awfully cheery about this. It sold reasonably well, at around 30k owners as reported on SteamSpy, even if we subtract the 10k free copies, that's still going to be around 20k sold. Because of the regional prices and sales on other platforms we can't straight up say how much it really made, but that's not all that bad. And, at one point in time it was #3 trending game in early access. Undertale comparison is ludicrous. It's fun to do I guess, but not every game can be a unicorn like that. There are AAA titles that did _much_ worse than that (in terms of sold units). So the factual reality is that the game exists, it's fun to play for me and even if it doesn't account to much in terms of sales, it continue to exist and bring joy to this world.

all the time. It might not always be phone call, it an be a wassup or skype call, but in many situations texting is just WAY too clunky and slow

Jebus... for $400 you can make a tabletop model of a city in those games, and play in IRL

A few days? You're pretty lucky, I haven't had any in what feels like years. Do you wake up from an alarm clock or by yourself? Maybe you're just too tired?