OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

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Wittmann
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OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#1 Post by Wittmann »

Hello everyone, I am posting on behalf of DEVGRU-P.

We're an American Visual Novel Development Team, and have a big release coming up next week. As a team, we very interested in putting our money back into the community, and want to help other developers get their projects off the ground and on Steam.

As such, we are looking for Visual Novels that are currently early to midway in the development cycle, who are aiming for a commercial release in the future.

Because we have worked with Valve on getting our game onto Steam, we have a pretty good handle on how to actually use Valve's software (SteamPipe) to handle game builds and keys and whatnot.

Specifically, what we want to do is,

Kickstarter
-Pre Campaign advice, helping you pick a good funding amojnt, designing reward tiers.
-Building the campaign, writing the pitch, laying it out to make an attractive and professional looking campaign.
-Contacting gaming websites to drive traffic to your campaign.


Steam
-Building your Steam Greenlight page.
-Submitting the game to Steam Greenlight (this costs $100 the first time an account submits to Greenlight, our account already has gone through the process, which our account has).
-Managing customer questions on Steam, monitoring the page.
-After the game has been approved by Valve, we'll build the Steam Store page, and handle actually getting the files on Valve's server.


In addition, depending on the funding goals and our level of interest in the project, we would also be interested in footing some of the development costs.

Our primary interests are in games that really set themselves apart concept wise, and bring something new to the genre.

Specifically some general things we have an interest in,
-Comedy
-Military/War
-[BxG, GxG] (So no Yaoi)
-Non-Romance Games


Please feel free to contact us with any questions, or to discuss working together on your project.

If you want to make it easier, please let us know this about your project,
How far along in the development process are you/When do you expect to finish?
How much money do you need (at the very bare minimum) to make your game, and what do you plan on spending it on?
Do you currently have any funding?
Do you have a full team already? Does your team have much prior experience?


Also we'd love to see the art you have so far, so that we can get a style idea.

Thanks for your time!
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#2 Post by firecat »

so you just want credit for helping a game? anyone can start a kickstarter, anyone can pay $100 and start a greenlight, anyone can do anything you just listed.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#3 Post by Wittmann »

firecat wrote:so you just want credit for helping a game? anyone can start a kickstarter, anyone can pay $100 and start a greenlight, anyone can do anything you just listed.
Anyone can start a Kickstarter, but that doesn't mean every Kickstarter will be just as successful. There are plenty of Kickstarters that don't succeed due to inexperience, and that's something we bring to the table. We all have different talents, some of us are artists, some are writers, other programmers. I am a writer, but I also have practical experience in managing Kickstarters, and doing PR Work.

Also, if you notice, we also mentioned working out funding deals for projects.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#4 Post by Jiro Horikoshi »

Wittmann,

A kickstarter of merely $4k hardly justifies the experience necessary to help others. Considering the average money an OELVN raises through kickstarter is somewhere along $5K to $6K, from a developer's perspective I wouldn't be very convinced that your offer is very attractive from the sea of OELVNs currently existent.
If you can maybe present some details on exactly how you plan to assist potential teams in PR management or kickstarter funding, I feel a lot of more people would be swayed to your proposal.

Best Regards,

J. Horikoshi

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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#5 Post by Wittmann »

Jiro Horikoshi wrote:Wittmann,

A kickstarter of merely $4k hardly justifies the experience necessary to help others. Considering the average money an OELVN raises through kickstarter is somewhere along $5K to $6K, from a developer's perspective I wouldn't be very convinced that your offer is very attractive from the sea of OELVNs currently existent.
If you can maybe present some details on exactly how you plan to assist potential teams in PR management or kickstarter funding, I feel a lot of more people would be swayed to your proposal.

Best Regards,

J. Horikoshi
A lot of it was between goals and results, in that we exceeded our goal by a large margin.

One of the big interests we have would be in funding games ourselves, or mixing Kickstarter and our funding. In addition, I have a lot of personal connections (outside of VNs and Games) with a number of people in media who can provide signal boost and endorsements/reviews to help boost attention to games. Advice is cheap, but we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#6 Post by KittyWills »

No offence Wittmann, but this sounds kinda shady. I googled your group, I couldn't find a website. Only having a steam and twitter page doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence.

But jump right in, does helping out Devs are you having them join your company? (ala. I published my book through Penguins Publishing House). Will you own any rights to the game? Publishing rights or merch?

By having devs use your Steam account they loose the ability to take care off stuff there them self. They don't "know" you. It's a liability. PLUS, how are sales kept clean?

And segway into sales. No where in your post do you talk about what money you take home. Is a percentage? A flat rate? Anything at all? Are you offering this from the goodness of your heart?

I need more hard facts and numbers. Just saying "We will help you." and "We have connections." isn't enough. What do you get in return for helping fund games? Are you an investor or rights holder? What sort of contracts do you deal with?

There are countless people on here who will help with kickstarters or steam. Hell, I'm helping another group write legal contracts right now for free. If you honestly want to help other devs, I commend that, but your business model needs to be stronger for me.

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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#7 Post by Wittmann »

KittyWills wrote:No offence Wittmann, but this sounds kinda shady. I googled your group, I couldn't find a website. Only having a steam and twitter page doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence.

But jump right in, does helping out Devs are you having them join your company? (ala. I published my book through Penguins Publishing House). Will you own any rights to the game? Publishing rights or merch?

By having devs use your Steam account they loose the ability to take care off stuff there them self. They don't "know" you. It's a liability. PLUS, how are sales kept clean?

And segway into sales. No where in your post do you talk about what money you take home. Is a percentage? A flat rate? Anything at all? Are you offering this from the goodness of your heart?

I need more hard facts and numbers. Just saying "We will help you." and "We have connections." isn't enough. What do you get in return for helping fund games? Are you an investor or rights holder? What sort of contracts do you deal with?

There are countless people on here who will help with kickstarters or steam. Hell, I'm helping another group write legal contracts right now for free. If you honestly want to help other devs, I commend that, but your business model needs to be stronger for me.
Hey Kitty, this is something we just fully figured out today, nothing is entirely set in stone, and we're still working on getting a professional looking website set up.

For the first issue, with Steam accounts, you can appoint other accounts to be administrators of individual applications, without them accessing all of them. So the Devs from Game 123 would have administrator access to that app, and the Devs from game XYZ would be able to access all of the administrator (and financial tools/information) for that game.

In terms of money, and I know everybody hates this answer, but "it depends". Most likely it would be percentage based, with the percent being higher based on the amount of money we invest towards funding the game, but never an amount that exploits developers. We aim to be extremely transparent about our financial practices, and treat developers fairly and as partners, as opposed to profit avenues. The goal here is both to build a sustainable business model, and also to reinvest a lot of money into the OELVN community, specifically to help fund games that bring something new and interesting to the genre.

The exact percent depends on (actuarial sciences time) the risk of investment, and the expected returns. So teams without much experience, and ones earlier in the development process, are obviously riskier investments, so it would change how much we'd be willing to invest.

Some things that I can guarantee though, is that we don't have any plans to,
-Lock developers into a multi-title deal (where they have to work with us if they want to do a sequel)
-Become IP holders, developers would retain the rights to use their characters and art in other projects how they see fit after completing the game (such as merchandise)
-And other such practices


So we have absolutely no plans to become rights holders, if your game takes off, does super well, and you want to make a sequel on your own, it's your IP, and we have no claims to it. That's something I want to be clear from day one.

And absolutely, I don't expect someone to just sign something with us before we fully hash out the contract specifics and exactly how we would be proceeding, this is more of a general announcement and interest thread.

I hope I answered any questions you had, please feel free to ask about anything that still needs clarification.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#8 Post by demonicbagel »

Ah. If only I had money to put into my projects myself. As it is, I can only really afford to make free development/free to play games, which is extremely difficult with limited options.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#9 Post by Wittmann »

demonicbagel wrote:Ah. If only I had money to put into my projects myself. As it is, I can only really afford to make free development/free to play games, which is extremely difficult with limited options.
If you have a project you'd be interesting in showing us, please feel free to shoot us a message.
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#10 Post by firecat »

Wittmann wrote:
KittyWills wrote:
In terms of money, and I know everybody hates this answer, but "it depends". Most likely it would be percentage based, with the percent being higher based on the amount of money we invest towards funding the game, but never an amount that exploits developers. We aim to be extremely transparent about our financial practices, and treat developers fairly and as partners, as opposed to profit avenues. The goal here is both to build a sustainable business model, and also to reinvest a lot of money into the OELVN community, specifically to help fund games that bring something new and interesting to the genre.

The exact percent depends on (actuarial sciences time) the risk of investment, and the expected returns. So teams without much experience, and ones earlier in the development process, are obviously riskier investments, so it would change how much we'd be willing to invest.
since you have no plans to switch to itch.io or anywhere else (steam only really...) that means developers will get less from you. lets do some math:

(XX = your company)
(?? = steam)
(O = team or person) [people lose money to pay bills or house]
(A = answer)

XX% - ??% divide by O - VAT tax = A

lets say a team of two join, the game is sold for $5 for a 2 hour indie vn game and first release. you want 5% that means the total lost will always be 1.75 or more if steam choice to rise the percentage. this leads 3.25 for the two but VAT tax applies so lets say UK only brought the vn, this will be a lost of 20%, they will only have 2.60. now that all that is done they divide the money since they earn it, $1.30 is the total.

you not helping them with anything you just adding to their already impossible lost. i never heard of your games, you only have one kickstarter, you have no website, no financial experience and no way better than blackshell media (https://blackshellmedia.com/ )
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#11 Post by Jiro Horikoshi »

From what I can conclude they're basically a group of people with good intentions but no solid expertise. It never hurts to collab with people like them, so I suggest you all give it a shot :D

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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#12 Post by Wittmann »

firecat wrote:
Wittmann wrote:
KittyWills wrote:
In terms of money, and I know everybody hates this answer, but "it depends". Most likely it would be percentage based, with the percent being higher based on the amount of money we invest towards funding the game, but never an amount that exploits developers. We aim to be extremely transparent about our financial practices, and treat developers fairly and as partners, as opposed to profit avenues. The goal here is both to build a sustainable business model, and also to reinvest a lot of money into the OELVN community, specifically to help fund games that bring something new and interesting to the genre.

The exact percent depends on (actuarial sciences time) the risk of investment, and the expected returns. So teams without much experience, and ones earlier in the development process, are obviously riskier investments, so it would change how much we'd be willing to invest.
since you have no plans to switch to itch.io or anywhere else (steam only really...) that means developers will get less from you. lets do some math:

(XX = your company)
(?? = steam)
(O = team or person) [people lose money to pay bills or house]
(A = answer)

XX% - ??% divide by O - VAT tax = A

lets say a team of two join, the game is sold for $5 for a 2 hour indie vn game and first release. you want 5% that means the total lost will always be 1.75 or more if steam choice to rise the percentage. this leads 3.25 for the two but VAT tax applies so lets say UK only brought the vn, this will be a lost of 20%, they will only have 2.60. now that all that is done they divide the money since they earn it, $1.30 is the total.

you not helping them with anything you just adding to their already impossible lost. i never heard of your games, you only have one kickstarter, you have no website, no financial experience and no way better than blackshell media (https://blackshellmedia.com/ )
Steam doesn't publicly reveal their profit split (NDAs), and you can increase the price of your game in each country to help offset the VAT that the EU applies.

We never said that we were exclusively dealing with Steam either, there are plenty of other distributors, such as the Humble Bundle, GreenManGaming, GOG, etc.

Jiro Horikoshi wrote:From what I can conclude they're basically a group of people with good intentions but no solid expertise. It never hurts to collab with people like them, so I suggest you all give it a shot :D
Thanks Jiro!
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Re: OELVN Publisher Looking for Projects

#13 Post by TheJerminator15 »

It seems like very good intentions, but I think it would have been wise to have waited until you had your plans/policies for the most part ironed out before announcing this.

Also, Im only going off what I know of your team (which isn't a lot since Im new to the EVN scene) but it seems like your only game/good success was Panzermadels. If this is true I think it would have been better to have made some more games and put them on sale before attempting this. Publishing is a very risky/expensive enterprise, so having more experience would definitely not have hurt. It just seemed to me that you're getting ahead of yourself after one success. Experience as well as connections would have only made you a better choice. Again, if Panzermadels wasnt the only game, I apologise.

I can see why you would want to do this, and if this does work out with the intentions you had I'll be the first to congratulate you.
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