The Banner Saga Post-funding Update #19: Funding Breakdown

In the nineteenth update to hit The Banner Saga Kickstarter page, the team explains where the roughly $724,000 in funding they raised will be going and reveals how much of a house 4000 physical “prizes” actually takes up. First, the video update:

And the breakdown itself:

‘¢ Of $730k, 10% immediately comes out for amazon, kickstarter and failed payments. We actually had a shockingly low number of these failed payments, but this alone leaves us with roughly $650k.
‘¢ Actual prizes cost us about $22k to produce. $22,000 certainly is a lot for posters, tshirts and some fancy art, but this was not a surprise to us since we had gotten estimates and set prices based on that.
‘¢ Shipping costs are a bit troublesome, especially since we have a fair number of international backers. We estimated that shipping would cost roughly an amount equal to the prizes themselves. When comparing our prices to other kickstarter campaigns we felt that we couldn’t ask for more than the standard international shipping rate- between $10 and $20. This helps but does not cover the cost. Now any time I see a campaign asking for an extra $10 for international shipping I just assume they have no idea what they’re talking about. That said, it’s not like this will cut into our budget by a significant amount with the kind of volume we’re pushing. Between prizes and shipping that’s another 18% of our total funds.
‘¢ Once we’ve dealt with all that business we’ve got about $600k to work with. I want to re-emphasize that this came as a surprise to none of us!
‘¢ As for development, contractor salaries take the lions share. We’ve now contracted (not hired) two programmers, a sound design team, a dedicated composer, a QA specialist, a writer, an interface artist, a community manager and an entire animation production house working for us to produce more content than we ever dreamed at higher quality. That, my friends, is currently where a good 50% of our total funding goes.
‘¢ We’ve got the mundane business expenses like a (rather miniscule) office lease, software like adobe products, dropbox and fmod, computer upgrades, and hardware coming out to about 5% of our budget.
‘¢ We’re anticipating the relatively small operation costs of maintaining our own server-side data on amazon’s cloud so people can download the game from us and play online without Steam.
‘¢ Lastly, we’ve put aside the remaining funding as our safety net which will be re-evaluated as we go. You never know when things are going to go unexpectedly wrong.
‘¢ We’re still not taking personal salaries. We’ll be living off our savings until our game starts making income.