Where is Charan?

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RottenSausage#6164 wrote:

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Moridin79#6328 wrote:

What drama are you referring to?

People arguing about who kept the game alive 12 years ago.

Ah yes. Quite silly indeed.

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Foreverhappychan#4626 wrote:

Oh.

I guess i will just be over here quietly crying.

This isn't how I thought I'd be remembered.

You guys really hated on me.

from what i "know"/have heard. you seem to complain a huge lot and had very divisive opinions on the game.

kinda like what i am doing nowadays. lol.

but you went to the point you "ragequit" the forums. asked ggg to delete all your old posts and "rebirthed" yourself under your new persona.

i dont know enough about the past to verify and since the posts are gone i cant make any opinions since thats the case.

but i will say that i can imagine how frustrated it can be if i dropped so much money on an indie game which "promised" us a game direction but went a different direction later.

which actually is what happened to me, tho i dropped way less than you but given my financial situation i would say its significant TO ME.

POE now is definitely not the POE that i originally signed up for.

as for whether you're hated or not. my current interactions with you gives me absolutely ZERO reason to hate you.

in fact, coming from someone who loves the idea of what poe2 is about to be, i will say GGG OWES you a lot for being one of their biggest contributors.

anyone who loves POE owes you a lot too because you dumped a huge load of cash that GGG really needed when it was in it's infancy.

if you're ever in malaysia let me know and i ll buy you a meal at the very least. but as of now the best i can do is tip my fedora hat.

also i really feel that GGG could do more to commemorate all their old supporters. its a real shame that most of the supporter uniques end up as vendor food. one guy i know designed a div card but its now "disabled".

but yeah, it doesnt makes sense business wise for them to do that.

in any case. looking forward for poe2, and i m pretty sure things would have been very different without you (edit, yeah its arguable that the contribution could be just a portion of what they had but still the amount is significant given the infancy of their company back then). poe2 might not even have happened.

cheers

Have fun in PD2!

As an occasional poster, long time lurker (for 11 years or so(, I can definitely say that I looked forward to, and enjoyed Charan's long posts.

I do play PoE occasionally, but the content bloat has become overwhelming for good old me heh.

Hope you find / found what you are / were looking for, Charan!

Where's Charan?

"Tis a gift to be simple 'tis a gift to be free
'Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we get to the place that’s right
We’ll be in the valley of love and delight

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shall not be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right."

Shaker hymn

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

That's underselling it by a lot. He was one of the whales who basically kept GGG from closing down. I know that he at the very least bought the $10k Supporter Pack back in the day, and has shilled out tons more. He might be a bit eccentric, but you can thank him for being one of the few key supporters that allowed us to have the game we know today.

Just for the record, it's highly unlikely that Charans contributions were large enough to stop GGG from closing down. Even if Charan contributed more than 10k in purchases that's not nearly enough to keep a company like GGG going for even a week. GGG already had private investment to fund the project, and I highly suspect it was the lower tier supporter packs that generated the most income for the company at that point in time. Not to say that Charans investments weren't big, they certainly were for an individual. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the ocean.

Making video games is very, VERY expensive, especially one as large as Path of Exile. And while Charans contributions were appreciated by GGG at the time, his impact financially wasn't as much as you think.

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ciknay#1000 wrote:

Just for the record, it's highly unlikely that Charans contributions were large enough to stop GGG from closing down. Even if Charan contributed more than 10k in purchases that's not nearly enough to keep a company like GGG going for even a week.

You forget that GGG had a tiny team of like 14 people at the time. Charan has spent at least $30k during early development, or that's at least the amount I'm aware of. Considering that GGG raised $245k total in 2013 during the launch of the game, that's quite the considerable amount. A total of 13 people purchased the $1k packs at the time. If you can't understand the significance of early cash flow in game development, I don't know what to tell you. That isn't to say that certain generosity hasn't also caused GGG a few headaches down the line...

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Foreverhappychan#4626 wrote:

(PoE makes us all insane somehow)

Ain't that the truth!

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

You forget that GGG had a tiny team of like 14 people at the time. Charan has spent at least $30k during early development, or that's at least the amount I'm aware of. Considering that GGG raised $245k total in 2013 during the launch of the game, that's quite the considerable amount. A total of 13 people purchased the $1k packs at the time. If you can't understand the significance of early cash flow in game development, I don't know what to tell you. That isn't to say that certain generosity hasn't also caused GGG a few headaches down the line...

I understand the cashflow perfectly. But I don't think you understand just how expensive games are, even with a relatively small team. I've worked in the video games industry for some years. Let's do some math:

14 devs, with an average of 40k NZD a year. That's the average salary of a programming job in NZ in 2013. It's likely higher than that because GGG struggled to find good programmers at the time and would need to offer good salaries, but let's work with the lower end. That's 560k NZD a year alone in salaries. The NZD was about 80c to the USD at the time in 2011-13, so that's roughly 450k USD in salaries. These numbers get much larger as they hire more people closer to release.

Account for things like renting the office space, equipment, other utilities and insurance, and you've got a lot of money being spent per year. From 2011-2013 they easily could have been spending into the millions trying to get this game out the door. Chris has been open that the game was privately funded in the starting period for some years, so this isn't a massive surprise.

See where I'm getting at? Even if the specifics of the numbers aren't 100% accurate, they're still large. I agree, Charans contributions (and the other diamond supporters) were significant and shouldn't be discounted. But it's far more likely that the closed/open beta packages were less about funding the entirety of the development, and more about proving to investors that GGG had a product that had a dedicated audience willing to spend big that they could then capitalise on going into the future.

Eh Charan , check in. I know there’s no way you’d miss this monumental event, this sequel to the greatest ARPG of all time, despite the indifferences with ggg. Battle on man.