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Hi, OP! Since you seem to be very interested in only talking to people with some kind of credentials, I am a developer on a project that has more app downloads than everything HyperDevBox has published, combined! I hope this qualifies me to talk to you about your development pipeline! 1) In my professional experience with mobile gaming projects, both direct and indirect, you have gone public and requested crowdfunding at an extraordinarily early stage in development. I am aware that you may have special circumstances, but you have not explained those circumstances in your pitch. Is there a reason for this? 2) In my professional experience with mobile gaming projects, both direct and indirect, 14 months is an extremely long amount of time to have gone between beginning the project and being at the "late concept" phase. Is there a reason for this? 3) In my professional experience with mobile gaming projects, both direct and indirect, I would have expected to see day-0 outreach to various gaming journalism sites. Many of them will pretty much publicize your press release for you, no questions asked, and still somehow get significant traffic. Is there a reason you've chosen not to do this? 4) Do you seriously expect to hire an experienced mobile developer for an office in Ikebukuro for the equivalent of $28k US per year?
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Jan 6, 2017 07:17
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The thing you guys don't seem to understand about crowdfunding is that increased transparency is the price you pay for eschewing a traditional publisher. I asked those questions (okay, 3/4 of those questions) because they would be the exact questions anyone doing due diligence on you would after a pitch meeting. You can get away with giving defensive non answers on these dead comedy forums, though why you're bothering escapes me. But they're not convincing anyone, and in this post Star Citizen world where backers are used to crowdfunding dumpster fires, you can see the results. I swear to God this is genuine, professional, 100% good intentioned advice from someone in the industry: yank your campaign, get a good consultant and a live gameplay demo video, get a Goddamn press strategy sorted out, and relaunch.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:25
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poo poo, you guys aren't even on Siliconera, and they'll print a handwritten presser on wadded up newsprint if you tape an anime character design to it.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:28
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boy are my arms tired posted:also 28k equivalent in ikebukuro is doable but it ain't great, you'd have to penny pinch. if i were to move back to japan on that salary i'd find a job in osaka or kobe or something similar instead of the fifth most expensive city in the world lmao I was more talking about the other side of that equation. Around here, an experienced C++/Java/mobile guy commands a six figure compensation package, and the first digit ain't a one.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:41
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also OP i'm probably on your ignore list but i'm a huge loving weeaboo, have beaten final fantasy v something like 22 times, and was pursuing a history minor with my senior thesis on the french revolution so if your pitch didn't work on me it's not going to work on literally anyone
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Jan 6, 2017 20:08
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Kelp Me! posted:So you're a game dev with experience in RPGs and a strong background in French history? they unironcally can't afford my consulting fee
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Jan 6, 2017 22:01
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:Hey buddy if you haven't made a big time videogame then please don't criticize my approach I'm a small studio and I work real hard ok!! its all true i'm at a big company and look how i'm spending my day 
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Jan 6, 2017 22:18
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Prokhor Zakharov posted:Yeah and how many successful crowdfundings has your, so-called, AAA company had? Oh, zero? Yeah please don't comment you clearly have no idea what you're talking about my pitch is excellent . . . . does an ipo count as crowdfunding
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Jan 6, 2017 23:01
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Jan 7, 2017 02:05
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WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH THE MARSEILLAISE
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Jan 7, 2017 02:06
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it's been a long-rear end time since school but who would read a series of effortposts on the revolution, if this thread is still alive in like a week or so the french revolution is legit one of the most interesting spans of human history and i wouldn't want anyone to go away thinking it was just guillotines and bad jrpg pitches
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Jan 13, 2017 00:24
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their job postings require english and have japanese as a nice-to-have, it was a decent thought but i don't think it'll work man
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Jan 13, 2017 22:05
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close the fuckin thread, mo-mo''s
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Jan 13, 2017 23:59
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I actually currently work at Google and am genuinely curious in what sense we are supposed to be partners with them.
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Jan 14, 2017 08:39
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"we downloaded the free version of the Android SDK, that makes us key partners right?"
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Jan 14, 2017 08:40
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People are dumb disclaimer: I don't do anything having to do with Android, the store, Play Games, etc right now. I am not privy to anything nonpublic about this mess, and have no decision making power. If I was/did, I wouldn't be posting in this thread. You can be as mean to me as you like and the only thing that will happen is I fume impotently for a bit.
Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 09:05
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lit shaking with rage rn
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Jan 14, 2017 09:20
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it would be weird if the dude decided that i we personally the reason something bad happened to them re: play store approval or whatever, and i wouldn't put it past him at this point
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Jan 14, 2017 18:17
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also i'm totally going to make sure you see nothing but ads for bad kickstarters now you jerk!!!!!
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Jan 14, 2017 18:20
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ow
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Jan 14, 2017 19:29
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Well, it's the weekend right now, so why not. The Revolution and what happened afterwards is kind of a big deal in Western political science--hell, our modern terminology of right-wing vs. left-wing comes from it--and so over the years a lot of people with very serious axes to grind have taken it on. I'm going to hew very closely to the two "orthodox" views you might get in an undergraduate course, both because they're what I'm most familiar with and because they happen to involve a lot of hilarious incompetence on everyone's behalf. 1. bad_with_money.jpeg.txt At the time of the Revolution, the King of France is Louis XVI. His family, the Bourbons, has been in charge of France for a long time (as you might guess by the fact that he's literally the sixteenth of his name). For most of that time, the cornerstone of Bourbon policy has been hostility towards the ruling house of Spain, the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs-controlled states of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire have been the biggest powers in Continental Europe for ages, and happen to surround France on both sides. This policy goes back at least to the not-actually-30-years-long Thirty Years' War of the 1600s, and the Catholic Cardinal Richelieu (yeah, the bad guy from the Three Musketeers) deciding to throw in with the various mostly-Protestant forces challenging the Catholic HRE. In the years since, it's resulted in a series of extremely messy and unproductive wars between France and various Habsburg states such as Spain and Austria. These wars, combined with a series of equally messy civil wars, meant that the Bourbons were pretty much always broke. The habit of building places like these probably didn't help, either.  By the mid 1700s, however, this policy has pretty much succeeded in reordering Europe. The Spanish Habsburgs, who are somehow even worse at money than the Bourbons (though coasting on a tidal wave of American silver) are mostly out of the picture. Plus, the rising power of Prussia under Frederick the Great--formally part of the Holy Roman Empire--has provided a convenient counterweight to traditional Austrian power. In the 1740s, the French and Prussians under Frederick the Great team up to stand in the way of Maria Theresa of Austria's ascension to the Habsburg throne, and in the process deal the deathblow to any pretense of Austria's leadership in Europe. Everything is going great. Naturally, it was time to throw that all overboard, ally with the Austrian Habsburgs, and get their rear end kicked by the rest of Europe. I'm being a little unfair here--the last bit presumably wasn't part of the original plan--but when Louis XV responded to a softening of relations between Britain and Prussia by throwing in with the Austrians, he mostly ended up dragging France into Austria's problems with no benefit. In 1754, the Austrians attempt to get some of their own back and invade Silesia, which they had lost to the Prussians back in the 1740s. The British pile in on the Prussian side, the French pile in on the Austrian side, and the Seven Years' War ensues. Those of us who attended high school in the United States know its American theatre as the French and Indian Wars. Long story short, the French ended up spending about eleventymillion livres (their currency of the time) on their navy and army, got pretty much the entire fleet sunk by the British, and pretty much the entire army trashed by the Prussians. Plus, they ended up losing Canada and their trans-Mississippi holdings in the bargain. Louis XV is not thrilled by this and--just when the throne's finances are already imploding--embarks on an elaborate and expensive military rebuilding program in an attempt to challenge the British and reverse his losses. Prussian-style discipline, uniforms, and drill were instituted as far as he could get away with. He finally gives the nod to the era's greatest artillerist, Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval, to build the finest artillery corps in Europe. There was a ridiculous shipbuilding program centered around a new, massive shipyard in Cherbourg. And he ordered the establishment of twelve military schools, predecessors to the legendary École Saint-Cyr. One at Brienne near modern Troyes was host to a hick seminary dropout from Corsica, with okay-ish grades but no social life and few prospects. We'll come back to Napoleoné Buonaparte a bit later. And hell, it pays off! Louis XV kicks the bucket in 1774, but his son is in good position to take advantage of British problems in their American territories. In 1776 Louis XVI begins funneling covert military aid to rebels in On 3 September 1782, the Treaty of Paris was signed, affirming the United States' independence and granting it significant territorial concessions at the cost of the British. Champagne and smiles all around. On 4 September 1782, Louis XVI's ministers woke up from a massive hangover and realize that they just spent another billion livre, financed at a ruinous cost, on a war from which they gained nothing. French attempts to roll back British influence in India came to nothing. The entire brand new, expensive, French fleet lasted just long enough to win the war for the Americans before sailing off to take a shot at Jamaica and getting embarrassingly sunk (again). And they didn't even come close to taking back Canada. They now have a basically unprecedented financial crisis on their hands. Incoming revenues are barely enough to pay interest on their loans, let alone actually let the kingdom function. They could raise taxes, but the French taxation system is completely buried in archaic exceptions and exemptions nobody actually understands. It will take real political skill, finesse, and financial acumen to pull the country from the brink. Next time: they do not demonstrate political skill, finesse, or financial acumen
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Jan 14, 2017 22:28
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Thanks for the corrections on Louis XVI's parentage. Both of you are absolutely correct. 2. On the Brink Alright, so last time I promised I'd be getting a little bit more into the exact sequence of events that cause Things To Get Worse. It turns out that I lied--the more I thought about it, the harder it was to get across how easy it was for so many people to mismanage things so poorly. The central figure, of course, is Louis XVI himself. If you crack open a high school world history textbook, the story looks something like this: "Louis XVI was a terrible king and also a tyrant because Jefferson said so in that famous quote; eventually he became enough of a tyrant that people overthrew him and cut off his head; also Marie Antoinette's head. Then Napoleon took over and he eventually got his rear end kicked at Waterloo, but not before selling the Louisiana Territory to us for way too cheap. Heh, what a dumbass." Obviously, (almost) nobody gets out of bed in the morning and decides that hey, today they're going to be a terrible tyrannical king. And that doesn't really describe Louis XVI--he had a ton of personal faults and may have been pretty much the worst guy for the job, but he does genuinely have seemed to want to do right. He just wasn't very good at it. Maybe more importantly, he had an almost impossible problem on his hands. A lot of the insane things that he and his ministers are about to do are a lot more understandable once you realize exactly how much of a clusterfuck late 18th century France is. France is politically speaking, incoherent. When I say "France" what I really mean is the territories held by the Bourbon family, which once encompassed only a relatively small chunk centered on the modern Ile-de-France. But that was in the Middle Ages. By conquest or marriage or inheritance, "France" gradually katamaried up the various surrounding states that used to occupy the territory of modern France. This process was still ongoing at the time of Louis XVI--the Lorraine had been added to Bourbon domains in 1766, well within living memory. This is a problem, because as a consequence 1700s France is about as legally organized as a katamari. Each of the individual parts of Louis XVI's empire have their own legal system, inherited from when they were independent. Imagine if the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution went something like this: A different, deeply terrifying history posted:The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, except for Minnesota, the western half of North Carolina, and all formerly Spanish or Mexican territories--where taxes shall be collected on land ownership instead. This shall exempt income on agricultural products in the states created from the Louisiana territory, and the San Francisco Bay Area (except for Marin County). Taxes must be paid in kind in the original 13 colonies, but may be accepted in any legal tender elsewhere in the country. The IRS must also accept payment in coconut shells anywhere coconuts are commercially grown, because that's how they used to do it. Also, one United States dollar (or coconut) doesn't correspond to one Tax Dollar anywhere outside of Washington, D.C, and in order to find out what your exchange rate is you must trust the tax collector who's being paid as a percentage of what he takes in. Now imagine if every single loving law in the country either worked like this or was a customary law that nobody ever bothered to write down. Oh, yeah, and nobody can even agree on what a state is, the exact borders of any of the states, or even how many states there are. Now imagine trying to run that country. France is, socially speaking, incoherent. There's an organization today, the French Academy, whose only real job is to regulate and standardize a single French language. The Academy actually existed in Louis XVI's day, but its reach was limited to the relatively prosperous Paris Basin and some of the textile-manufacturing regions which did significant internal business--Normandy, Amiens, Rouen, Lyon. Anywhere outside this relatively tight "core" may as well have lived in a different country, socially as well as legally. To the south the old Roman heartlands on the far side of the Massif Central, the rich agricultural highlands of Provence and the rapidly growing trade center of Languedoc, had a particular reputation for separatism. Occitan, a language/language family (depending on who you ask) having way more to do with Catalan than French, was dominant in Southern France during the time of the Bourbons. Even those who understood French would have done so in the Meridional accent, which sounds distinctly odd to a Parisan ear. Just as importantly, Occitania was the traditional stronghold of the staunchly Calvinist French Huguenot population; it had been illegal to be a Protestant in France since Louis XIV's day. By the eve of the Revolution, almost nobody personally remembered the widespread guerrilla warfare of the Camisard revolts in the early 1700s. But the conflict had been conducted with massive brutality on both sides, and the social scars still ran deep. To the north the regions dominated by the Channel ports were cotton country as surely as any city in England, tightly bound by the Seine and Meuse to Paris' trade networks and therefore to Paris' culture. But travel a bit further to the west--too far west for the Seine, too far north for the Loire--and things got a lot murkier. Brittany and western Normandy are dominated by the bocage, a mess of hedgerows and lovely windy roads that will still be around to give Patton so much trouble a century and a half in the future. The bocage shielded the region from central authority in more ways than just physical. There, the peasants spoke Breton, a today-dying language almost completely unintelligible to a French speaker. Still, it was a reasonably prosperous region with its own coastal import-export economy, driven by international trade through Nantes (and to a lesser degree Brest) instead of the Channel market. Even further west from Paris, in the marshy, rocky, hilly shithole of the Vendée, the people didn't even have that. The departments of the former Vendée are doing well economically today, thanks in large part to modern transportation networks, but in the late 1700s they were rich in nothing but resentment. The Vendée in particular is about to blow up in pretty much everyone's faces, but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. France is, economically speaking, incoherent. I'm about to make some simplified generalizations about the French economy, here. They're simplistic precisely because the country was so divided socially and legally--the great ports such as Nantes and Bordeaux are going to do quite well for themselves during this period--but on the whole it's very much a rich-get-richer/poor-get-poorer trend. For obvious reasons, this last bit is what left-leaning historians tend to focus on as a cause of the Revolution. The basic idea is simple--in the middle years of the 18th century, good weather and a lack of major crop blights had gotten everyone accustomed to grain production being higher than what would have been reasonable. Since the average Frenchman ate a lot of bread the unsustainably low food prices drove unsustainably high population growth. Some parts of the country were less dependent on wheat--peasants in the heavily Germanified Alsace and Lorraine knew the value of potatoes, and there are scattered references to a developing corn trade in the south--but they were subsistence economies. They didn't produce enough surplus food to cover for the metropolises of the Paris basin when wheat yields fell back to earth. And when they did fall in the 1770s or so, they fell hard. French agriculture got hit with many years in a row of bad weather and nasty crop blights that pushed smallholders and sharecroppers off their land and drove them to the cities looking for work. Just as massively increasing food prices had driven people who already lived there into homelessness, first by the thousands, then by the tens and hundreds of thousands, then finally by the millions. When I say "millions", remember that France had a population of perhaps 25 million in the years leading up to the Revolution. This spiral of widespread urban squalor and poverty in Paris, surrounding on every side the richly gilded palaces of the Bourbons, was a societal bomb just waiting to cook off. It's almost a miracle things didn't come to a head earlier; widespread anger had held in check only by the government's aggressive and highly visible attempts to regulate the grain trade and limit profiteering. I mean, they wouldn't be stupid enough to deregulate the grain trade under those circumstances, right? Especially not in the middle of a famine? Next time: they absolutely, definitely, 100% are stupid enough Reiterpallasch fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 21, 2017 01:59
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Sorry; it's been busy around here. I meant to cover Turgot, Necker, and Calonne in one megapost, but here's a quick one to keep the thread alive. 3. Things Get Worse. Alright. So to recap: it's the early 1770s, and the French state is in crisis. The Crown is broke beyond human comprehension, and the late 1760s have ushered in a new era of lousy weather and uncertain harvests--the first sign of real trouble on that front is in 1768. It's not like Louis XVI, or rather his ministers, are completely unaware of this. At this point in the Anicen Regime, the guy in the government most in charge of the economy is the minister of finance--the contrôleur général, often translated as Comptroller-General or Controller-General. Recognizing the crisis, Louis XVI appoints one of the most capable men he has to the job, in August 1774. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot is just the first of many theoretically capable people who proved to be the wrong man for the crisis. It started off well enough: the guy was generally well-liked and trusted, and his position let him do a significant amount of economizing. By slashing highly visible governmental expenses, he built confidence from the bankers who held most of the Crown's loans, and was able to refinance quite a bit of debt on more favorable terms. Unfortunately for him, he made two significant missteps while in office. First, he strongly opposed French involvement in the American Revolution, on the quite correct grounds that it would be a fiscal catastrophe that would destroy the country. When the king overrode him, and a glorious* profitable** triumph*** ensued, Turgot's political star was correspondingly dimmed. Second, his big crusade while in office was to deregulate and rationalize French agriculture. A lot of people (including Wikipedia) like to portray Turgot's quixotic obsession with grain deregulation as an early expression of laissez-faire economics, which is frankly stupid. Adam Smith won't even publish his Wealth of Nations for two more years. In reality, Turgot was a physiocrat--a follower of François Quesnay's Tableau économique, one of the first attempts at constructing a formal theory of economics. Similarly to modern liberal economists, physiocrats believed that economies functioned best when they were allowed to run without artificial limits on their productivity. Unlike modern economists, physiocrats believed that agriculture was the only source of actual wealth (which is stupid) and that massive governmental intervention in the markets was needed to "unlock" the hidden potential of the land. Honestly, if you look at the crazy patchwork of constraints on French agriculture--feudal duties, trade monopolies, weird taxes, sharecropping practices--it's not hard to see why they might have thought this way. And French agriculture really was, measured in yield-per-acre, backwards compared to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately for everyone, the physiocrats attempted to attack the problem from the distribution side first--probably because trying to unwind 300 years of contradictory local laws and customs on the supply side sounded hard, but the Crown directly controlled regulations on the distribution side. Historically, the government used careful price fixing in order to keep bread prices under control. It was illegal to export grain out of a region that was suffering from crop failure, and the Crown had the right to force a merchant to sell grain at below the going price (theoretically compensating them in a later year, when harvests were better). Turgot, like the other physiocrats, saw these rules as part of the problem. One of his first acts in office was to eliminate almost all controls on the grain trade. Cue one of the worst harvests on record in fall 1774, and an almost equally poor one in the spring of the next year. A more skilled politician than Turgot might have done an about-face and lived to fight another day. But Turgot stuck to his guns. By spring, the price of bread across the country was out of control. In Paris, at the worst of it, an unskilled laborer could spend almost his entire daily wage on bread for himself and his family, and still go hungry. A family which was already barely making ends meet with bread taking up half of the budget was completely hosed if bread rose 50% over the pre-famine price. This was already true through much of the Paris basin by March. (as an aside: if when i say "bread" you think of the rustic boules and batards or the crusty baguettes of a modern French bakery, think again. bread in the late 1700s was made from a blend of wheat, buckwheat, rye, grass, bone meal, chalk, and whatever else the grain merchant could sneak in. it was baked into heavy, incredibly dense, hideous bricks weighing between 2-5 pounds each, and the average working-class Frenchman got something like 80% of his calories in this way.) In April, the unrest started. By the 28th, riots rocked Beaumont-sur-Oise, in southwest Burgundy, barely a day's ride away from the capital. They spread like wildfire from there, through the whole of the Paris Basin and the Île-de-France. Bread riots in that era were a little odd by modern standards--there was very little smash-and-grab looting. People considered it the government's moral duty to keep bread prices under control, and if the government had failed in its obligations, it was their own duty to step up. The most common form of bread riot was in fact a controlled sale. Rioters would break into a grain warehouse or bakery, chase the owners out, set up an impromptu storefront and start selling the grain at a price they thought fairer, then gave the money to the owner. By early May, the rioters were outside the gates of Versailles. The rioters were talking about a "famine pact"--an old conspiracy theory in which the government was deliberately colluding with grain merchants to profiteer off of public misery--and the King had had enough. He sent half in the army, and it took repression, arrests, and two executions to get the situation under control. The lid was back on the pot for now, though now that grain riots were on the table Toulouse and Bordeaux would simmer over in 1778 and drat near all of Normandy in 1784. The Crown survived, for now. Turgot did not. He was sacked in May 1776, and the King was in the business for another Controller-General. Next time: Encyclopedia Necker and the Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Budget
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Jan 31, 2017 20:23
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i'm at least loving going to get to the actual guillotining of the king, god drat it, even if it kills me
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Feb 7, 2017 22:38
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