Quoted from benheck:Here's what I believe to be the deal with manufacturing:
In the interview, if you listen between the lines, they know RAZA is a dog. All they talk about is the system around it, what the next games are, and mostly the PinBar. Mentions how much work it was to get RAZA going (because John sold them a light diorama) and as for how many they will sell? 100? Maybe 200? Robert says. He doesn't know (who does?) but knows it won't be a lot. (This is the same guy who back in early 2015, without playing it, thought Magic Girl could sell 2800 units on looks alone. Note how often he says "beauty" in these videos)
Look, I'm sure RAZA is shootable. But it's pretty weak considering NINE YEARS of dev and the money deepRoot spent and their level of their ambition.
The 3 week sales window is so they know how much they have to hire up/ramp up for manufacturing starting in January.
Then the question becomes how close is their next game? A line is a beast that must be fed, so are they going to scale out the hiring to keep making RAZA until Food Truck is ready? When that bombs how close is Goonies to being ready?
So let's say they get 200 pre-orders for RAZA (which is likely the maximum if they only sold 25 games in 2 days).. let's assume they have some sort of assembly line, whatever that is. This is their first rodeo. Even if they hired an experienced production engineer, I'm assuming that person hasn't built out an assembly line for pinball machines (which sorry, are niche). Even if they somehow manage to build 20 games/week, that's 10 weeks. Is the next game going to be ready in that short time? Not just a complete layout game tested, but artwork, code, ALL parts ready to go? From my experience, lead-time on parts can be anywhere from a month to 4 months.