The Russian Studio that Created almost 100% of Games Assets Is Here

[lion]

https://www.artstation.com/obeliskstudio/albums/all

"The Obelisk Studio team was responsible for the creation of huge chunk of the assets in Sons of the Forest game. We are very glad that we had such an opportunity.
Huge thanks to Endnight Games and all our awesome team.
It was a long and difficult journey, 3 years long, but we really enjoyed working on this cool project.
All assets were rendered in Unity."

If they outsourced so much and most of their own work goes to crafting the raw story, coding & base-building.. then why do they assume it will be finished in less than a year when they took already this long to get where they are as of now?"

[Maviba]

Escrito originalmente por lyan:

Escrito originalmente por BubonicDuck:

Oh nice, they're a good studio, did a great job.
Can see them getting lots more work in the future after this success.

I'm not complaining or critising. just showing an unknown fact

No, you are trolling and trying to discredit the dev's work by implying that they're only using other people's work for their game.

So they were using assets. And? Nothing special or dishonest about this.
Almost every game studio buys and uses them.
That's the point of assets and that's what the store is for. 😉

No need to reinvent the wheel. Developing a game is already time consuming enough

[lion]

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Escrito originalmente por lyan:

I'm not complaining or critising. just showing an unknown fact

No, you are trolling and trying to discredit the dev's work by implying that they're only using other people's work for their game.

So they were using assets. And? Nothing special or dishonest about this.
Almost every game studio buys and uses them.
That's the point of assets and that's what the store is for. 😉

No need to reinvent the wheel. Developing a game is already time consuming enough

Outsourcing is fine. Problem is they had all the help and support and yet they fail to deliver the game and was untrustworthy

[Tebeas]

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Escrito originalmente por Ataxio:

I don't understand this point of this thread.

Me neither.
He obviously is trilling or just doesn't know what he's talking about.

But hey, a small indie game studio is using some assets from the unity store.
Oh no. How dare they? ^^

The Forest sold 5.3 milion copies (numbers reported all the way back in 2018). Double that for the consoles and you get around 200 milion dollars of revenue. After all of the expenses they had about 90 milion dollars of clean money. The studio has around 15-25 employees + all of the help from foreign companies. Would you still describe the studio as indie? Hmm?

[Maviba]

Escrito originalmente por lyan:

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

No, you are trolling and trying to discredit the dev's work by implying that they're only using other people's work for their game.

So they were using assets. And? Nothing special or dishonest about this.
Almost every game studio buys and uses them.
That's the point of assets and that's what the store is for. 😉

No need to reinvent the wheel. Developing a game is already time consuming enough

Outsourcing is fine. Problem is they had all the help and support and yet they fail to deliver the game and was untrustworthy

Not untrustworthy for me.

I know what developing a game means and you can't develop a game by just buying a few assets
It only saves some money and decreases the effort so you may focus on more important things.

If you think different and are the opinion the game development is that easy:
Well, download unity, get some free assets and try to make a game similar to this one.
I'm curious about how far you get.

And as for the trustworthiness.
I experienced how well Endnight handled the last forest's EA.

And i haven't seen much to complain during SotF's one yet.
We're getting regular updates every two weeks, which is faster than it was during the original Forest's EA.

They're also fast with hotfixes and apparently the do listen to the community, as we already saw when they added hotkeys.

I already paid way mor money for less enjoyable AAA games.

[Four Little Diamonds]

Escrito originalmente por Tebeas:

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Me neither.
He obviously is trilling or just doesn't know what he's talking about.

But hey, a small indie game studio is using some assets from the unity store.
Oh no. How dare they? ^^

The Forest sold 5.3 milion copies (numbers reported all the way back in 2018). Double that for the consoles and you get around 200 milion dollars of revenue. After all of the expenses they had about 90 milion dollars of clean money. The studio has around 15-25 employees + all of the help from foreign companies. Would you still describe the studio as indie? Hmm?

Capcom's networth is about 6.5 billion dollars with over 3,000 employees. If you want to consider Endnight triple A, you can compare them to Capcom or actual triple A devs all day.

[Andi]

Speaking of Indie devs, The Forest was published by Endnight (independently), SotF publisher is Newnight, wich very obviously was founded by their own for obvious reasons like investments, taxes, diversified income, shared responsibilities ect. ect...
Of course there's hundreds good reasons to run multiple businesses.
But theoretically, by the OLD initial definition of indie devs (doing their own thing, realizing their own ideas, publishing WITHOUT having to fulfill contract regulations for a publisher), Endnight's not an independent developer anymore, even if it's the same CEOs running those companies and receiving 2 manager salaries each month, because they're smart.
(I'd actually love to get hands on the contract and read through it! ;b)
In short - all you people defending endnight due to being such a poor small indie team, think about it whilst Endnight / Newnight CEOs laughing at you from their million dollar mansions and yachts.

[Stevo Mullup]

I'm a hard surface modeller and worked on a couple of projects, and the games I've worked on have all used store assets or bought assets so it's no big deal.In fact my bosses in some cases would rather that because they might be cheaper to buy rather than spend the time to make or have better geometry and less polys than I could do,it's a lot more common than you think.

[Maviba]

Escrito originalmente por Tebeas:

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Me neither.
He obviously is trilling or just doesn't know what he's talking about.

But hey, a small indie game studio is using some assets from the unity store.
Oh no. How dare they? ^^

The Forest sold 5.3 milion copies (numbers reported all the way back in 2018). Double that for the consoles and you get around 200 milion dollars of revenue. After all of the expenses they had about 90 milion dollars of clean money. The studio has around 15-25 employees + all of the help from foreign companies. Would you still describe the studio as indie? Hmm?

Seems like you don't know much about the economics of a game company or how it works.

First of all:
Revenue <> earnings
And were talking about the revenue of 12 years in total.
And also about the expenses that accumulated during the last 14 years.

200mio+ revenue is what major publishers have per year so yes, it's still an indie studio for sure.

Steam gets a 30% cut for each game, so does (or did) Microsoft and also sony for games sold in their stores.
All of them take alsp 30% (MS reduced to 12 last year)

So given your numbers are true this alone reduces the revenues to 140.000.000 $ already

Divide this to 14 (the amount of years the game has been in development) and get 10.000.000 $ revenue per annum.

Now there are taxes and insurances to pay, loans and interests repayments, studio maintenance, investments into new hardware, required platform licences and surcharges ( devs have to pay them when developing for consoles).

Publishers have also to pay for the reviews that are required for the youth protection rating - for each country the game is supposed to get released.
In Germany for example it can easily cost 50.000-100.000 per game.
So now do the maths for the other countries

Now the wages.
A developer, depending on the country and experience earns between 50.000 and 100.000 $ p.a, AFAIK the original team was 10 devs.
An employer also pays partially for health insurance, so let's say it's a million per year that endnight payed for the devs p.a.
Meanwhile new employees joined and they also need to be paid.

Now you mentioned the console versions
Console versions need a retail version.
Means the game is stored on DVD or BR and therefore needs both a packaging and printed inlay as well.
How much do you think does this cost for a few hundred thousand or maybe a million copies?
How much the distribution to different countries all over the world?
How much do you think are the expenses for that?

Still missing the expenses for freelancers snd agency's involved (e.g. actors, musicans, external designers...)
They don't work for free either and they slso cost s lot of money.

Oh and don't forget reserves and provisions in order to be prepared for future expenditures or just to have a financial backup in case something gets wrong.

So Investing every single cent they earned with TF just to fund SOTF isn't a smart choice if Endnight wants to operate sustainably.

Not to mention all the other expenses besides.
So probably not much left from the Forest's revenue.

[Tebeas]

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Escrito originalmente por Tebeas:

The Forest sold 5.3 milion copies (numbers reported all the way back in 2018). Double that for the consoles and you get around 200 milion dollars of revenue. After all of the expenses they had about 90 milion dollars of clean money. The studio has around 15-25 employees + all of the help from foreign companies. Would you still describe the studio as indie? Hmm?

Seems like you don't know much about the economics of a game company or how it works.

First of all:
Revenue <> earnings
And were talking about the revenue of 12 years in total.
And also about the expenses that accumulated during the last 14 years.

200mio+ revenue is what major publishers have per year so yes, it's still an indie studio for sure.

Steam gets a 30% cut for each game, so does (or did) Microsoft and also sony for games sold in their stores.
All of them take alsp 30% (MS reduced to 12 last year)

So given your numbers are true this alone reduces the revenues to 140.000.000 $ already

Divide this to 14 (the amount of years the game has been in development) and get 10.000.000 $ revenue per annum.

Now there are taxes and insurances to pay, loans and interests repayments, studio maintenance, investments into new hardware, required platform licences and surcharges ( devs have to pay them when developing for consoles).

Publishers have also to pay for the reviews that are required for the youth protection rating - for each country the game is supposed to get released.
In Germany for example it can easily cost 50.000-100.000 per game.
So now do the maths for the other countries

Now the wages.
A developer, depending on the country and experience earns between 50.000 and 100.000 $ p.a, AFAIK the original team was 10 devs.
An employer also pays partially for health insurance, so let's say it's a million per year that endnight payed for the devs p.a.
Meanwhile new employees joined and they also need to be paid.

Now you mentioned the console versions
Console versions need a retail version.
Means the game is stored on DVD or BR and therefore needs both a packaging and printed inlay as well.
How much do you think does this cost for a few hundred thousand or maybe a million copies?
How much the distribution to different countries all over the world?
How much do you think are the expenses for that?

Still missing the expenses for freelancers snd agency's involved (e.g. actors, musicans, external designers...)
They don't work for free either and they slso cost s lot of money.

Oh and don't forget reserves and provisions in order to be prepared for future expenditures or just to have a financial backup in case something gets wrong.

So Investing every single cent they earned with TF just to fund SOTF isn't a smart choice if Endnight wants to operate sustainably.

Not to mention all the other expenses besides.
So probably not much left from the Forest's revenue.

There is so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in your post I do not even know where to begin.. First of all let's talk about steam's cut

Sales below 10 milion = 30%
Sales above 10 milion = 25%
Sales 50 milion and above = 20%

Which makes all of your 'math' or rather incoherent ramblings worthless. Not to mention that Sony/Microsoft stopped the publishing/update fee nonsense years ago. For 'smaller' developers anyway

Second of all: There are no physical copies of either The Forest or SOTF. Games do not need to have physical copies in order to be published on consoles lmao are you insane or just THAT uneducated?

Third of all: 14 years in development?? What the ♥♥♥♥ bro. Did you forget to take your meds again? The Forest alpha released around 10 years ago lmao. SOTF is in development for over 5 years

I have better things to do than spend 3 hours doing math hence I will just paste a comment I found detailing EVERYTHING:



You my friend are very misinformed on how game development works and even more misinformed on how money amd budgets work.

Considering most of your math and figures are wrong, you might want to apply that assessment to yourself.

>Actually it's less than 100 million.

I'm talking revenue. The Forest sold 5.3 million copies on PC (and that was as of 2018, so likely many more than that). At $20 per, that's $106,000,000. Then they released on console - I don't have the exact figures but I'd guess console matched PC sales. That's another $106,000,000. So total revenue around $212,000,000.

>With little to no income over the last 6 ish years

Again, totally wrong. The Forest released on console in Q4 2018, so about 5 years ago. They've been selling copies of their game since then. Not as much as release, but they haven't had "little to no income" in 6 years.

>but still needing to pay employees

They have 15 employees. Let's say the average makes $100k/year, thats $1.5 million per year to payroll, call it $2 mil with benefits. So over the last 5 years, you're looking at roughly $10 million to pay your employees.

Let's say they rent a commercial space for $5k a month. That's $60k/year *5 years = $300k in rent since they started development.

>steam takes 30%

Steam takes 30% of sales up to $10 million, 25% from 10-50 million, and 20% at anything over 50 million. So Steam has netted about 22.8% of their sales. Might not seem like a huge difference but when you're talking in the hundred million range, 7.2% is a lot.

So they sold roughly $106,000,000 on Steam - take away Steam's cut that's $81,832,000 left over. We can assume around the same cut from console stores, so out of our original $212,000,000 in revenue, they'd have $163,664,000 take home.

Minus the $10 million for payroll/benefits puts them at $153,664,000. Minus $300k in rent gets us to $153,334,000

Canadian corporate taxes are roughly 30% give or take, so they've probably paid around $65,000,000 in taxes, leaving us with $88,334,000 profit after rent, payroll/benefits, and taxes.

Unless they are a horribly mismanaged company financially, Endnight has a hell of a lot more than "a few million" to use to develop this game. $212 million in revenue (and again, likely higher) for a 15 person studio is insane. Their operating expenses are low as a game studio.

My numbers may be off by a few %, they probably are. But nowhere near enough to change the fact that they had 5 years and a massive bank account to make this game, and what we got was akin to a mid-development demo. AND they just sold over 2 million copies in 24 hours, so another $60 million just hit their bank. They have plenty of money, their product should be better than this.

[Kaisoku]

Company is in Vancouver. Multiply that by 10 honestly, for commercial leasing prices. Canada isn't "cheap living" in any major city.
Also, the game isn't made just by 15 developers... it has voice actors, music production (usually a single person, but possibly production/publishing behind it too). There's hardware, especially if they needed to invest into console porting. Lots of cost not really mentioned.

But honestly, I see this thread as "I think this is an asset flip/disingenuous game production because...".
Pick apart the company's finances all you want, this is going to boil down to "Well, I don't like what I'm seeing" anyways.

And that's fine. You spent 20$, you have your opinion and you move on. You won't convince everyone, and putting pressure on different aspects won't matter either way. Having long-winded arguments is only going to satisfy some personal desire to "be right" and "win online". If that's your goal, then cool, have fun. :)

I personally feel like I've had most of money's worth out of this game already. In a year or so, I expect I'll see enough updates to cover what I feel was the value of my expenditure. Not an amazing game, but then again... I only dropped a few bucks on it so that's to be expected.

[alfaunicorn81]

Escrito originalmente por Andi:

Speaking of Indie devs, The Forest was published by Endnight (independently), SotF publisher is Newnight, wich very obviously was founded by their own for obvious reasons like investments, taxes, diversified income, shared responsibilities ect. ect...
Of course there's hundreds good reasons to run multiple businesses.
But theoretically, by the OLD initial definition of indie devs (doing their own thing, realizing their own ideas, publishing WITHOUT having to fulfill contract regulations for a publisher), Endnight's not an independent developer anymore, even if it's the same CEOs running those companies and receiving 2 manager salaries each month, because they're smart.
(I'd actually love to get hands on the contract and read through it! ;b)
In short - all you people defending endnight due to being such a poor small indie team, think about it whilst Endnight / Newnight CEOs laughing at you from their million dollar mansions and yachts.

You know a lot! xD

https://endnightgames.com/careers

VANCOUVER BC
SENIOR ENVIRONMENT ARTIST
Located in Vancouver, Canada, Endnight Games is an independent video-game development company known for the hit game ‘The Forest’.

https://steamdb.info/developer/Endnight+Games+Ltd/

The Endnight Games management team includes Ben Falcone (CEO), Rod Green (Project Director), and Jonathan Kreuzer (Senior Engineer).

https://rocketreach.co/endnight-games-management_b4783fb4fc30a516

So where's the 'russian russian oligarch' located?

[Hexzyti]

I would guess covid likely slowed progress. I would also assume that at least a year was spent in the planning stage, as many games, especially bigger ones, can have a 6 year development timeline with only half those years being spent on actual, meaningful development.

I don't mind the outsourcing so much, it's mostly the fact they had all these assets done for them (getting a huge chunk of work of their backs) yet still failed to really deliver. I enjoy the game but it feels so empty despite having this studio providing them with the assets. Like, they really couldn't of had more unique locations implemented or at least shown to be planned to be implemented?

A little more transparency would have been appreciated I think

[Caz]

Escrito originalmente por Tebeas:

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Me neither.
He obviously is trilling or just doesn't know what he's talking about.

But hey, a small indie game studio is using some assets from the unity store.
Oh no. How dare they? ^^

The Forest sold 5.3 milion copies (numbers reported all the way back in 2018). Double that for the consoles and you get around 200 milion dollars of revenue. After all of the expenses they had about 90 milion dollars of clean money. The studio has around 15-25 employees + all of the help from foreign companies. Would you still describe the studio as indie? Hmm?

Money is not a sign of whether it's an indie dev or not.

[Boogie 0_0]

Escrito originalmente por Tebeas:

Escrito originalmente por Maviba:

Seems like you don't know much about the economics of a game company or how it works.

First of all:
Revenue <> earnings
And were talking about the revenue of 12 years in total.
And also about the expenses that accumulated during the last 14 years.

200mio+ revenue is what major publishers have per year so yes, it's still an indie studio for sure.

Steam gets a 30% cut for each game, so does (or did) Microsoft and also sony for games sold in their stores.
All of them take alsp 30% (MS reduced to 12 last year)

So given your numbers are true this alone reduces the revenues to 140.000.000 $ already

Divide this to 14 (the amount of years the game has been in development) and get 10.000.000 $ revenue per annum.

Now there are taxes and insurances to pay, loans and interests repayments, studio maintenance, investments into new hardware, required platform licences and surcharges ( devs have to pay them when developing for consoles).

Publishers have also to pay for the reviews that are required for the youth protection rating - for each country the game is supposed to get released.
In Germany for example it can easily cost 50.000-100.000 per game.
So now do the maths for the other countries

Now the wages.
A developer, depending on the country and experience earns between 50.000 and 100.000 $ p.a, AFAIK the original team was 10 devs.
An employer also pays partially for health insurance, so let's say it's a million per year that endnight payed for the devs p.a.
Meanwhile new employees joined and they also need to be paid.

Now you mentioned the console versions
Console versions need a retail version.
Means the game is stored on DVD or BR and therefore needs both a packaging and printed inlay as well.
How much do you think does this cost for a few hundred thousand or maybe a million copies?
How much the distribution to different countries all over the world?
How much do you think are the expenses for that?

Still missing the expenses for freelancers snd agency's involved (e.g. actors, musicans, external designers...)
They don't work for free either and they slso cost s lot of money.

Oh and don't forget reserves and provisions in order to be prepared for future expenditures or just to have a financial backup in case something gets wrong.

So Investing every single cent they earned with TF just to fund SOTF isn't a smart choice if Endnight wants to operate sustainably.

Not to mention all the other expenses besides.
So probably not much left from the Forest's revenue.

There is so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in your post I do not even know where to begin.. First of all let's talk about steam's cut

Sales below 10 milion = 30%
Sales above 10 milion = 25%
Sales 50 milion and above = 20%

Which makes all of your 'math' or rather incoherent ramblings worthless. Not to mention that Sony/Microsoft stopped the publishing/update fee nonsense years ago. For 'smaller' developers anyway

Second of all: There are no physical copies of either The Forest or SOTF. Games do not need to have physical copies in order to be published on consoles lmao are you insane or just THAT uneducated?

Third of all: 14 years in development?? What the ♥♥♥♥ bro. Did you forget to take your meds again? The Forest alpha released around 10 years ago lmao. SOTF is in development for over 5 years

I have better things to do than spend 3 hours doing math hence I will just paste a comment I found detailing EVERYTHING:



You my friend are very misinformed on how game development works and even more misinformed on how money amd budgets work.

Considering most of your math and figures are wrong, you might want to apply that assessment to yourself.

>Actually it's less than 100 million.

I'm talking revenue. The Forest sold 5.3 million copies on PC (and that was as of 2018, so likely many more than that). At $20 per, that's $106,000,000. Then they released on console - I don't have the exact figures but I'd guess console matched PC sales. That's another $106,000,000. So total revenue around $212,000,000.

>With little to no income over the last 6 ish years

Again, totally wrong. The Forest released on console in Q4 2018, so about 5 years ago. They've been selling copies of their game since then. Not as much as release, but they haven't had "little to no income" in 6 years.

>but still needing to pay employees

They have 15 employees. Let's say the average makes $100k/year, thats $1.5 million per year to payroll, call it $2 mil with benefits. So over the last 5 years, you're looking at roughly $10 million to pay your employees.

Let's say they rent a commercial space for $5k a month. That's $60k/year *5 years = $300k in rent since they started development.

>steam takes 30%

Steam takes 30% of sales up to $10 million, 25% from 10-50 million, and 20% at anything over 50 million. So Steam has netted about 22.8% of their sales. Might not seem like a huge difference but when you're talking in the hundred million range, 7.2% is a lot.

So they sold roughly $106,000,000 on Steam - take away Steam's cut that's $81,832,000 left over. We can assume around the same cut from console stores, so out of our original $212,000,000 in revenue, they'd have $163,664,000 take home.

Minus the $10 million for payroll/benefits puts them at $153,664,000. Minus $300k in rent gets us to $153,334,000

Canadian corporate taxes are roughly 30% give or take, so they've probably paid around $65,000,000 in taxes, leaving us with $88,334,000 profit after rent, payroll/benefits, and taxes.

Unless they are a horribly mismanaged company financially, Endnight has a hell of a lot more than "a few million" to use to develop this game. $212 million in revenue (and again, likely higher) for a 15 person studio is insane. Their operating expenses are low as a game studio.

My numbers may be off by a few %, they probably are. But nowhere near enough to change the fact that they had 5 years and a massive bank account to make this game, and what we got was akin to a mid-development demo. AND they just sold over 2 million copies in 24 hours, so another $60 million just hit their bank. They have plenty of money, their product should be better than this.

True but they could be drip feeding content, as in all of the content for the game is basically completed and their just polishing it off and listening to the community and adding a bit more to it. While adding content quite slowly through two week patch's and hot fixes then letting players play and judge it. Matter of fact that's what they are doing and its good because we actually get to give them feedback and suggestions.
This would make sense if you pay attention to games like cyberpunk that rushed development and their game was released unfinished.

Instead of delaying or just releasing the game they released it into early access. Also they did say they had a rough estimate of 6 - 8 months and perhaps by then the game will be nearly finished. Think about it though, would you rather want everything they have right now or wait a bit longer for a more finalised product? I know I'd rather wait for a more complete game. You can only know if your right in 8 months so you should wait 8 months Lol

All the stuff in the trailers could be basically finished as we saw with the solar panels.......

Though what you said can't be totally accurate because they probably had other expenses as well and lots of things did happen like covid and the war in Ukraine as well as inflation that could've slowed down development.

[Kydyrium]

Escrito originalmente por lyan:

https://www.artstation.com/obeliskstudio/albums/all

"The Obelisk Studio team was responsible for the creation of huge chunk of the assets in Sons of the Forest game. We are very glad that we had such an opportunity.
Huge thanks to Endnight Games and all our awesome team.
It was a long and difficult journey, 3 years long, but we really enjoyed working on this cool project.
All assets were rendered in Unity."

If that's true then why are all the pictures only 4 weeks old?