Spellbook has been hard at work on their MMORPG Heroes of Dire for the last couple of months, and are now asking for funding through Kickstarter—$20,000 to be precise—to bring their heroes to the fore. Although I’m a fan of the art style—which brings back memories of Borderlands’ wacky character designs—I’m not so sure about some of the things they’re boasting about on the Kickstarter page.
For one, it definitely takes more than $20,000 to make a game of Heroes of Dire’s size, especially since Spellbook claims that it’s going to be one of those games you just “keep coming back to”—a game that “lasts for years.” That being said, Heroes of Dire will supposedly have “six fighter classes, ten races, fifty weapon classes and four armor classes” which is nothing to frown at. But I don’t see much in the way of gameplay on the Kickstarter page, which I presume has to do with the fact that Spellbook began full production on the game in December 2015.
My editor, Greg Micek noted that the stretch goals seem “overly aggressive”—it takes a mere $20,000 to make the game but a whopping $100,000 to add “fully-animated pets” onto the battlefield? What?! And then from $200,000 to $300,000, they’ll add some “epic boss raids”? It all seems rather peculiar to me. Then again, I may be in the minority; Heroes of Dire has already raised more than twice the amount they are asking for, and their campaign has only just begun.
You can track Heroes of Dire’s progress on our Campaign Calendar.
Author’s note: If Spellbook is reading this, I’d be interested in hearing your response to some of the queries I’ve listed above. My contact information is listed below.
Edit 5/4: We’ve posted a follow-up article titled Addressing Concerns Raised Over Heroes of Dire.
Hello Felix,
I’m the lead developer and owner of Spellbook and would love a chance to answer your questions. If you sent an email seeking out info before writing this, I’m sorry I missed it — I don’t see anything in our inbox.
Your concerns about the cost of Heroes of Dire are good! It’s exactly these types of fears I tried to address in the “Risks and challenges” section at the bottom of the kickstarter page.
Here’s a quote directly from that:
“We delayed our Kickstarter funding drive until we knew that Heroes of Dire was a solid product, and about 80% complete.
Our past success in online mobile games gave some financial padding, allowing us to self-fund the initial development costs. Assuming we can reach our modest funding goals, the chance of failure at this point is low. We’ve already built a fantastic game and just need a few more months of polish.”
So you’re absolutely correct — An MMO costs more than $20,000. We’ve already self-funded most of it. We came to kickstarter to get us the rest of the way there.
This is not an uncommon thing for smaller developers to do; it’s better for users, and it’s better for us. We have a real product to show, and not an empty promise.
The “Epic Raid Bosses” require entirely new maps, new models, new sounds, and new game mechanics, and probably a new developer to support it. $100,000 for those is too low, to be perfectly honest.
Even if none of our stretch goals are met, we still plan on implementing everything on that list sometime in the future, and kickstarter backers will still get those when we do.
Please feel free to email me with any questions!
-Ozy
MMORPG…45k..Kickstarter…I think if you guys were to collect data for MMORPG on kickstarter..you’ll probably see that it’s the type of game that ends up the most in failure..(because the cost are way higher than those people budget it..doing a MMO on KS is irrealistic).
But seriously i’d like to see a data about it of the successful MMO on KS that actually delivered in the end.
I’m not sure the author of this article has done his due-diligence as a reporter. In fact, I’m 100% sure he has not. The developer’s 7-minute video shows gameplay, and he says that the project is about 80% away from being a playable game. On top of that, I’ve done some basic Google and trademark searches. They have tm’s listed for their company and their games. Their websites are legit, they have message boards with seemingly active communities. I skimmed through their developer streams on Twitch, and although the game was being run from within the Unity3D editor, it looks like a mostly-complete and functioning game. The developer (not sure if it was the same person in the pitch video) goes through a bunch of the game’s features and was able to talk about them in-depth. I’m actually somewhat intrigued about the player-driven economy; it’d be cool if they could pull it off. I tend to be skeptical when it comes to Kickstarted games, but these guys are the real deal. I feel that Mr. Wong’s article and inflammatory headline is just…wrong.
Hey there, thanks for the response. My main concerns were of the the stretch goals and the $20000 required to fund the game. Ozy has admitted that the $100,000 Spellbook required to add animated pets in-game was an incorrect figure, he’s since corrected that. On the topic of $20K, he later sent me a response explaining that they’ve already finished and funded most of the game; I’ve since integrated that into a follow-up article which will be published in the next couple of days. I’ll admit that when I wrote “not much gameplay footage” (I’m paraphrasing here), I was being too subjective. I also wasn’t aware that there were a few hours of gameplay footage on Twitch; that’s my mistake. Anyways, a follow-up article should be published soon which will clear up some of the air.
I’m the lead developer and owner of Spellbook. My original long-winded reply got eaten by Disqus as “spam”.
The “Risks and challenges” section at the bottom of the kickstarter page covers these concerns.
Also, check out the developer video where I show gameplay footage, and our twitch stream where I have 2 hours of gameplay footage available.
When publishing negative articles about people, most journalists will try to contact them first. I’d have loved for a chance to chat with you before you posted this, so that I could direct you to the available information which was missed.
Our graphic for the stretch goals was incorrect. Pets are $25,000 and not $100,000. Artist is correcting it ASAP.
So, you really think you can pull it out? Honestly i am quite skeptical when it comes to MMO on KS. I’ve seen maybe hundred go into the wall..and the one that did released something were the one that had been over funded..and made 1M $ at least.
I understand that you self funded most part of the game already but there is a lot of..maintenance in a MMO. can you handle that and everything you want to achieve with this KS?
Sorry to appear doubtful..but MMO is an over crowded genre in KS for as much failure.
I don’t play MMO anymore (i’ve got a job and family..) but i am ok with giving out money to help out just for the sake of it.
Reading the post made by Mafiachick i google it and read your blog..and it does seems solid at least more solid that 90% of wannabe MMO you’ll see on KS. But..MMO does have a bad rep on this site.
I wouldn’t be accepting anyone’s money if I thought we couldn’t finish the game. I’ve built MMOs in the past, with the largest having 5+ years of up-time and over half-a-million players.
When people hear ‘MMO’ they think World of Warcraft. I don’t want to mislead anyone — It is not on that scale, which requires hundreds or thousands of people. It is an MMO because thousands of concurrent users play on the same server at the same time, interacting with the same environments, but the gameplay and mechanics are more simple than World of Warcraft.
Feel free to watch our videos on Twitch and YouTube if you’d like to see more. I demonstrate what the game is using the alpha client.
Thanks for your interest!
Hey Ozy, I’ve written a follow-up article integrating your response. It should clear up some of the confusion. Don’t hesitate to contact me through Twitter if you have any additional questions for me.
Talking for myself, i don’t think about WoW when i read MMO. Most of the one i played were small-scaled MMO like the one you previously built. Because i don’t like “large” community (and i am RP :p).
The thing is and i know i shouldn’t make comparison but on kickstarter the previous MMO that were funded there were small scaled MMO too..with a low funding goal. In the end it was totally unrealistic (those people probably were enthusiastic but with no real..skill or budget management abilities). The ending was most of the time a total..vanishing of Ethan Carter.
Thus, you’ll met a lot of people like me. People that are being cautious when they see a new MMO popping on kickstarter. This is also your audience and you’ll have to make an extra-effort that i know you shouldn’t have to do..(because you seem responsible an competent) to actually reassure them that you know what you are doing and that you’ll achieve what you intend. Put that on the nauseous reputation MMO has on kickstarter :/
En, i’ll pledge tomorrow. I need to activate my new credit card :p
I’m just checking back here to see if there were any new developments. I guess not. I pledged, too! I did the $60 package. I’ll see you in a few months, Dawnyaaa 😉
Heya there! Sorry, forgot to update this. Felix posted a followup article: http://cliqist.com/2016/05/04/addressing-concerns-raised-heroes-dire/
I’m still on the fence over how much to back. The $60 you mention seems tempting with the Boss Vanity effects though.
MMOs on Kickstarter are definitely risky. Not saying that the devs aren’t capable of doing it, but seeing an MMO with such a low funding goal combined with so few game assets outside of the funding video with the statement about just starting full time work on it certainly raised an eyebrow on my end.
[…] recently covering Spellbook’s upcoming RPG, Heroes of Dire, lead developer Ozymandias reached out to me to address […]
The game is live as of 12/17 and has been a great success. KS backers have received their unique fighters. In fact, I’ve asked if I could still back this even though it’s launched as the rare in-game items are excellent, yet don’t make any backers OP either.
The original article should have examined Spellbook’s success with TIB and also the fact that some of the codebase could possibly be leveraged from existing Spellbook game engines/frameworks. Also, Spellbook has had a great history of building incremental features in their MMO’s while using a monetization model that allows for adding developers as the game/revenue scales without upsetting game balance *and* preventing their games from being p2w.
My in-game name = Floki