[SLOWDOWN] Please be careful who you give business to.
Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 2:47 pm
Edit: Recent action on the post below implies that the OP there is willing to provide more information and work on his project. However, you should be careful when the below actions are taken by any businessman for any service.
It was suggested that I do this if I felt strongly about it, and I've decided to go ahead.
A certain post has been made involving selling a service to VN makers on this forum. You can see it here:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... f=4&t=7654
This is the exact definition of what you should avoid as an amateur making a commercial game.
The first thing you learn about running a business is that there is more to the business than saying "I'm selling something, please buy."
Before putting your money into a massive investment that will remove a large portion of your sales, you need to be extremely wary of all portions of the business.
Some major frightening pieces well known with scammers:
1) Poor website. Five seconds on that website will display how difficult it is to run. The demo is full of bugs. The OP claims that "his post is not there to show content", but any decent businessman with a product worth selling would already have a completed demo to display why his work is worth buying. Even just using a short, barely interesting story, the product itself, which is the engine, should be displayed to work to perfection. Be very short about trusting people who claim that there is a perfect product behind the scenes. He claims that "he cannot trust people with his work", but this is a common scam tactic used to avoid showing any working version.
This is not to say that there is not a working version at all. There may be one. However, do you want to buy something that you have to spend your time negotiating several times over to receive a simple demo of? Please consider this carefully. This is your hard work, and your money.
2) No sales figures, no reasonable expectation of exposure, no obvious or suggested long-term business plans. The death of your own business venture is easily reached by working with a dead end company. If your company cannot prove where it has been, or, if they are a new company, where they are going, or even why their direction corners a substantial market that is not covered, chances are they're not going anywhere.
In this case, there is no proof of the former, and the service itself works on speed, as in, you hire them to do work you can get for free from these very forums faster. Everyone's time is worth a different amount to them, but please carefully consider whether your time is worth the price.
3) Inability to determine what should be given to the public and what should not.
Things that you need to provide to make a business:
-Sales figures/direction
-Working prototype
-Up-to-date agreements!
The most basic business owners will provide a completely up-to-date schema of pieces, including their agreements and their prototype, even when they just post feelers. A business owner who will succeed understands that even when posting examples, you must post an example that is mid-to-high level if you are wary to show your best and most perfect work. That is what the prototype is for.
4) Inability to keep business manner on a forum, or beyond that, even in the thread of business. A business owner who leaps full-bodily on any critique or questions, no matter how they are asked. Business is about taking advice. If you can't do so gracefully, you will not make your way very well.
5) Basic research before investing time in a project. Reasonable research of VNs, how indie VNs are made, and what the capabilities of existing free products are should've been looked into before even starting development. One should be wary about a product being created when the person did not think to examine other products "on the market", or free, in this case.
Again, I am not saying that the post is a scam. I am saying that as someone who runs a small business (completely unrelated to the video game market) and occasionally needs to outsource or get services elsewhere, these practices would cause me to pass a place by.
If you're working free, this is a different story, but when money comes into the equation, people will do anything to get it, and it's up to you as buyers/users of services to protect yourself. Please be careful!
Edit:
To make my problems more clear, I give you a simple example:
Someone posts claiming they have an amazing game that has legions of professional art, A-list Japanese voice actors, and all sorts of fantastic, extra elements that most indie games don't have. However, when you go to see their site, they have a small downloadable demo that barely works, pictures of unprofessional, unrefined art, and no proof of any voice acting at all, despite the laundry list of voice actors they put down.
Oh, and they ask for 80USD to give you the full version.
When you mention the problems, they yell at you and call you insulting trolls and say they spent so much time on their perfect game that they didn't have time to mess with the site.
Would you buy this game? I think not.
It was suggested that I do this if I felt strongly about it, and I've decided to go ahead.
A certain post has been made involving selling a service to VN makers on this forum. You can see it here:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... f=4&t=7654
This is the exact definition of what you should avoid as an amateur making a commercial game.
The first thing you learn about running a business is that there is more to the business than saying "I'm selling something, please buy."
Before putting your money into a massive investment that will remove a large portion of your sales, you need to be extremely wary of all portions of the business.
Some major frightening pieces well known with scammers:
1) Poor website. Five seconds on that website will display how difficult it is to run. The demo is full of bugs. The OP claims that "his post is not there to show content", but any decent businessman with a product worth selling would already have a completed demo to display why his work is worth buying. Even just using a short, barely interesting story, the product itself, which is the engine, should be displayed to work to perfection. Be very short about trusting people who claim that there is a perfect product behind the scenes. He claims that "he cannot trust people with his work", but this is a common scam tactic used to avoid showing any working version.
This is not to say that there is not a working version at all. There may be one. However, do you want to buy something that you have to spend your time negotiating several times over to receive a simple demo of? Please consider this carefully. This is your hard work, and your money.
2) No sales figures, no reasonable expectation of exposure, no obvious or suggested long-term business plans. The death of your own business venture is easily reached by working with a dead end company. If your company cannot prove where it has been, or, if they are a new company, where they are going, or even why their direction corners a substantial market that is not covered, chances are they're not going anywhere.
In this case, there is no proof of the former, and the service itself works on speed, as in, you hire them to do work you can get for free from these very forums faster. Everyone's time is worth a different amount to them, but please carefully consider whether your time is worth the price.
3) Inability to determine what should be given to the public and what should not.
Things that you need to provide to make a business:
-Sales figures/direction
-Working prototype
-Up-to-date agreements!
The most basic business owners will provide a completely up-to-date schema of pieces, including their agreements and their prototype, even when they just post feelers. A business owner who will succeed understands that even when posting examples, you must post an example that is mid-to-high level if you are wary to show your best and most perfect work. That is what the prototype is for.
4) Inability to keep business manner on a forum, or beyond that, even in the thread of business. A business owner who leaps full-bodily on any critique or questions, no matter how they are asked. Business is about taking advice. If you can't do so gracefully, you will not make your way very well.
5) Basic research before investing time in a project. Reasonable research of VNs, how indie VNs are made, and what the capabilities of existing free products are should've been looked into before even starting development. One should be wary about a product being created when the person did not think to examine other products "on the market", or free, in this case.
Again, I am not saying that the post is a scam. I am saying that as someone who runs a small business (completely unrelated to the video game market) and occasionally needs to outsource or get services elsewhere, these practices would cause me to pass a place by.
If you're working free, this is a different story, but when money comes into the equation, people will do anything to get it, and it's up to you as buyers/users of services to protect yourself. Please be careful!
Edit:
To make my problems more clear, I give you a simple example:
Someone posts claiming they have an amazing game that has legions of professional art, A-list Japanese voice actors, and all sorts of fantastic, extra elements that most indie games don't have. However, when you go to see their site, they have a small downloadable demo that barely works, pictures of unprofessional, unrefined art, and no proof of any voice acting at all, despite the laundry list of voice actors they put down.
Oh, and they ask for 80USD to give you the full version.
When you mention the problems, they yell at you and call you insulting trolls and say they spent so much time on their perfect game that they didn't have time to mess with the site.
Would you buy this game? I think not.