Introduction
For my Entrepreneurship assignment our collaborative team has to make a business plan and my role is to make the Financial Projection and Sales Pipeline.
For our collaborative assignment we made a 3D FPS horror game called "Carnival of Evil". The business plan will be based on how we sell this game and making a forecast for the next 3 years to show prospective venture capitalists and get funding to help our game prosper.
Journal
Week 07/03/2022
Our collaborative team working on Carnival of Evil held an online meeting to talk about the basic idea of our business plan and how we can make our game into a business and not just a game to be played over the next few years. The best option seemed to be making it episodic similar to the Walking dead video game were new areas will be released every few months. We also talked about generating income from DLC packs with player skins and accessories.
Week 14/03/2022
This week we decided on which sections of the business plan each team member should work on. To make it even we chose 2 sections each and we can all fill in the appendices that match our roles. We shared a Google document so we can update the business plan all in the one place.
Week 21/03/2022
I had a closer look at my sections and read all to get a basic idea of what had to be done, then researched online about financial assumptions and found a web page Financial assumptions and your business plan that has a good starting point showing important topics outlined briefly. I also did some research on a Sales Pipeline and found a webpage Sales Pipeline that talks about the basics of what a sales pipeline is and how to build one.
Week 28/03/2022
To get started on the Profit and Loss Accounts, Balance Sheets and Cashflow sheet I needed to see how these look in the real world so did some researching until I found a web page called Financial Projections Template that I used to base my sheet structure on. This was a great boost to productivity because I could edit these instead of building each one by one from scratch during a time when a lot of assignments were due.
Week 04/04/2022
I made new copies of the templates, edited them to what parts we might need now or in future and pasted them into our shared business plan on google drive. I had trouble copy pasting because there was a lot of cell manipulation needed to get the table looking nice and readable so decided to insert links to the google sheets instead.
Now that I have basic idea of what a business plan is for and what financial assumptions we need to make I start adding assumptions like our R&D costs, wages and rent.
R&D could be done by one of our team and wouldn't cost anything. We can not start having wages until the second year because we won't be able to afford it until the company's Gross Margin grows above 30,000 euro. For the rent value I put 1,000 euro as a placeholder.
Week 11/04/2022
The links for the google sheets that I inserted into the business plan could not be opened due to access reasons so inserted new links that can be opened by anyone with the link. I entered some rough values that were in the business plan into the accounts just to give myself an idea of how realistic the figures were when they were balanced. It turned out that we had over estimated how much we would make each year and how many people would buy our games. I made some adjustments and conferred with my team and we all found some common ground figures that looked more modest.
Week 18/04/2022
I shopped around online for an office in Co.Louth that would be modern, clean and cheap. Most of the properties in Dundalk were above 1,600 euro a month so tried Drogheda and found a very nice place in a business building called The Mill Enterprise Hub that has a pool table, free drinks and the utility bill is included in the rent. There are 40 other company's so it would be good for networking. I called the letting agency about a price and was told it would be 750 euro including VAT. This was good because I could update the Profit and Loss account with the new cheaper rent price and take off any utility bills.
After thinking I had finished the accounts I had realized that the revenue looked to good to be true so did some more research on the cost of releasing a game on Steam and found a webpage Want to get your game on Steam that reminded me that Steam take 30% revenue from the game developer so had to add this to the profit and loss account and then reduce our wages and other expenses to match this.
Worked on the Sales Pipeline chart in our business plan.