Beamer wrote on Apr 19, 2012, 11:36:

We're kind of saying the same thing.

I mean business plans and milestones more for physical projects, but games to a lesser extent. As the article Blue linked mentioned, some of these projects are coming from people that haven't released anything that think they can make the best FPS ever for $325k. Well, I'd like to know that they've actually sat and thought about where this money is going and why they feel that is the right amount to ask for. We've all read that Kotaku article about the idiots that offered t-shirts without even bothering to price t-shirts and shipping ahead of time! They offered a perk at a new tier without understanding how much additional money they'd actually get from people jumping to that tier. And it was, I think, for an iPad game, yet they didn't even have iPads to develop on, which is another thing I think people should have known ahead of time.

Seeing a budget doesn't make us publishers, it just makes us educated.

We know that, at the very least, they've given thought to this other than sitting around going "well, there's three of us, and we would need 6 months to do this I think because I can code about 1 line per second, and we're each worth $100k/year, so we should ask for $150k!" That's a project almost doomed to fail. But another project where a guy actually plays the role of project manager and figures out a timeline and milestones and someone (maybe the same guy) thinks about what expenses will come up and does some at least reasonable estimating for all of them has a much better chance of succeeding.

It's far more true for the people making physical goods, but still true for people making games.