Still not seen those profit figures you alluded to earlier but this is the best info I could find on sales and revenue thus far ($36m).
I applied the formula given by the work-for-hire studio in my previous comment:
(Rate x 8) x (Employees x 20) x Months Of Work
- Developer hourly rate for western europe is = 66
- Fatshark headcount ( ~190) I got from here and here
- Months of work - assuming they started assigning at least some resources (tools engine upgrades at least) mid-2019 (6 months after PS4 launch) that’s roughly 40 months)
(668)(190*20)*40 = 80,256,000
Seems a little high, not the whole studio would have immediately jumped off VT2 (you gotta admit they gave that some serious LTS) and they seem to have increased their headcount too. So let’s halve it: 40,128,000.
Seems in-line with all the other stats and they’re nearing break even 2 months after launch. How did you arrive at your figures? I’m assuming it was more involved than just multiplying the price on Steam by an arbitrary number.
Evidence? If you are a practitioner of Swedish Employment law now’s the time admit it. I’m not but I’ve offered a rationale and evidence as justification to back up my claim that I know of studios/publishers who tell their employees not to engage with fans at all outside of official channels. Nor does this really address let alone invalidate my original point which was - fatshark actually have better community outreach and communicate more than most studios/publishers. There are many that don’t even have community managers or community forums and the only comms fans get is marketing through press releases and official social media.
Played a lot of Vermintide 1/2. Also know enough to know comparing DT to VT2 is like comparing a toddler to a teenager and the better comparison is DT with VT1. One version of the old model is basically, the first game in series is your MVP then the sequel or even the third instalment in a trilogy is your mature product.
Quick and dirty summary:
First instalment - you build all your tools, build/customise/adopt your engine, figure out the core mechanics, reusable assets etc. Your effort split is like 75% tech 25% content.
Second installment - now you have your engine and foundation you add more content and non-essential mechanics. You make few changes to core mechanics and the engine, add all the non-core mechanics (e.g. expanded classes, deeper customisation/crafting options, a random mini-game that tries to be as beloved as Gwent but isn’t etc.), enemy types and you just make the game bigger. Your effort split is like 25% tech 75% content.
Examples: Batman Arkham series (linear → open world → bigger open world with batmobile) , God of War and Ragnarok (spear and playing as companion), Horizon: ZD/FW (loads more dinos, weapons, deeper character progression, rubbish chess game, awesome remake of Road Rash only with robot goats), Shadow of Mordor/War.
When you build a new product you have to do loads of the groundwork again - at a minimum you have to upgrade your engine (either in house or use a newer version of the off the shelf Unity/Unreal which you will have customised and added your own tools to and may need to update for comparability), tools, third-party libraries etc. You have to build a whole new framework - one that if you try to jam code built for the old framework into you’re going to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to either make the new framework backwards compatible or playing whack-a-mole trying to bootstrap the old code to work in the new framework.
So it’s often just easier to build the contents for the new framework from scratch even if you are recreating something like-for-like and that still takes time.
So, I hope this explains why if you’re going to make a VT/DT comparison then DT is closer to VT1 in terms of it’s stage of the product life-cycle.
As an additional point of interest - this is also why remasters that doing anything more than upscaling textures take time/effort/money and there’s a who sub-section of the industry dedicated to it and studios like Bluepoint Games who specialise in it.
This is all highlights why comments like this reveal a lack of technical understanding. Even if a studio want to carry forward your learnings about how to make sword animation feel/look good into a brand new project you can’t just copy-paste it you have to rebuild it in the new framework.