Chronicles of Elyria boss explains how Soulbound burned through nearly $7M in three years

“I wanted to give current and future business owners – particularly game developers – an understanding of the actual and hidden costs of running a small game studio (avg. 17 employees). Very few such breakdowns exist, so I hope this proves to be a valuable resource for others.”

Thus begins the latest blog post from Chronicles of Elyria in which Jeromy Walsh highlights how the game studio managed to spend nearly $7M between 2017 and 2019 – all on a website that’s mostly intended to clarify that a game that was Kickstarted is actually going to happen.

Walsh first explains why he chose 2017 through 2019, which basically boils down to the studio still forming in 2015 and 2016, while 2020 to 2023 has seen the studio “operated with a skeleton crew, ranging from five individuals to just one” and pay legal fees. The breakdown then shows off total spend and average spend for the three selected years, breaking each one down by various categories like advertising, salary pay, convention costs, and more. Walsh further drills down on these categories and tries to explain the expenses shown.

In the closing paragraphs, Walsh bemoans how crowdfunding has “plenty of unexpected gotchas” such as paying to renew copyrights (since there’s no completed game) and the amount demanded by the IRS (because crowdsourced money is classed as money paid to the studio and not investment capital raised). He also warns potential dev studios about the expenses of payroll taxes and medical insurance and finally regrets not having gotten liability insurance for Soulbound Studios because “perception is more powerful than reality, especially in the game industry. And for better or worse, in the United States, people can sue you for just about anything they can convince a lawyer to sue you over.”

The post is framed as a way to not only inform future indies of the costs of doing business but also to commiserate with other devs about their experiences or gain advice from peers, all while bounding between selectively informative and perceptible self-pity. Unfortunately, as readers will recall, the problem is that backers still don’t have the video game they paid for – which is why the lawsuit came about in the first place.

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