Comments - Neffz

Your right, about the licensing... but why wasnt any of this mentioned before hand? do you have a business plan? are you buying 3ds max and the various other pieces of software and giving them out to your team? And as to you having a contact at ea... fair enough if you say that, but as to if you decide to go that route... it's not up to you at all. It would be suicide for that persons high profile career to make a contract with an unproven indie game groups very first development. Publishers want to publish things that are A. Guaranteed/Proven to succeed and bring in either money, or a future customer base, or B. Things they believe will succeed and they will have done a comprehensive risk analysis before making the decision. To claim you have control over whether EA get involved with you seems a little pretentious.

I understand the requirements in funding a games project, however I'm incredibly curious as to what you think you need such outrageous amounts of money for. Many people who start doing indie development do it while studying, or working another job because they can't afford not to. They realise that they need to prove themselves as a developer before someone will pay them for it. Now if you need money for licensing that's more understandable, 20k would be plenty though. A single license for 3DS max is around $2,500 give or take (last time I checked was in 2010), and zbrush is around $400. Now since I assume you aren't actually purchasing wacom pads for your artists or computers for your programmers and designers, and since you said you were student i'm assuming your living at home, you dont have rent to worry about... I just find it hard to imagine what on earth you think you would need $100,000 for. You have around 9 people, now I assume you are the producer, you probably have a couple artists maybe 3 modellers, a composer and 3 designers, or something along those lines, even if you intended to purchase licenses for all your modellers to use a 3D program, and paid your composer $5,000 you'd still have around 10,000 left. Do you have serious plans to get published? And if so by who? because the honest truth of indie development is you have next to no chance of getting a publisher without proof that your studio can deliver, its too big a risk on their part. This has turned into a bit of a rant I know, I was just quite shocked to see your budget estimates lol.