6K for music should be 1-2k at most!
Poster Art - What's wrong with those awesome sprites that Kotaku used. Should be 0.
IPads? More that one?
PAX East? - That's a holiday not a legitimate business expense.
This is why they say so many people don't make their money back in the App Store any more. You can't spend indie money like you work for a AAA studio.
Perhaps they want to make a big budget game with really great music from their favorite artist, really awesome posters, and I know of course that each dev should have an iPad. You might even need all the different kinds.
For good music? For music that you don't want to turn off the second time you play it? Don't undervalue good production values.
For a game developer? No, it's a fantastic way to raise the profile of your game. You get the most avid gamers interested in your game (who will spread the word if they like the game) and you get press coverage too. For an exhibitor PAX isn't a 3 day vacation, it's 5 or 6 days of working 12+ hours days, most of them staying chained to their booth in their expo hall.
You raise another good point though, not only is it 3k, but its 5-6 days at 12+ hours. A whole week of dev time lost to the event.
Events are great fun, but if you don't have money you don't know what to do with, I don't think they are a very good investment. Not much bang for the buck I don't think.
Do you have any metrics you can share about how an appearance at a show relate to final game sales? Or even press coverage?
For example, if they were to spend that money on banner advertising they could generate say 6-10k clicks through to their website.
I don't really have any customer data I can share with you, the sort of selling points generally used are more vague - such as "The average spend per visitor at last year's event on products sourced at the show was £767, a total audience spend of £79.8m" (taken from the sales pitch of a 2012 event). The overall focus of selling - though I'm not actually in sales so this isn't my direct area - is about the size of the audience, and what sort of demographic they are.
I don't know if events are a good use of your money when it's as tight as that, i.e. if you can chose between $3k on an event or $3k on a PR company, but only one, as I can't think of any exhibitor I've ever had that paid that little, or that was small enough not to have marketing budget around it.
The single biggest argument I can give, I think, is that if you go to PAX you're going to get more people looking at your game than you'd get clicks for $3k online - and when it comes down to it, are you going to sell your game better by having somebody look at your website, or stand in front of you try out your game?
Incidentally, what adverts are giving you that click-rate, and do you have any calculated CPA figures?
edit: I just want to note that like I said above, my experience comes more from big budget companies like big studio publishers rather than indies, so I can't necessarily say events are or aren't a great idea for people like you, just that they do offer bang for buck.
This is even more important for smaller indie teams where the developers are the ones manning the booths. I'd be way more interested in discussing the product if I knew I were talking to one of the developers. I found this reflected in my behavior at the vendor booths at pycon this year. When a booth was manned by salespeople, I'd just go take their free shirt and if I was interested in the product I'd only ask a few brief questions and leave with a brochure. When the booth was manned by the founders and three-quarters of the dev team, I was more apt to discuss further, asking about their software stack, or their thoughts on competing products, or the future roadmap of the product. This type of perspective a salesperson doesn't have and usually can't officially speak about.
I have heard anecdotally that a click in a mobile game costs a lot less.
Fully agree that spending a small percentage of your marketing budget on shows is great. And as I said before, they are heaps of fun and a great holiday for the team. You get to rub shoulders with the press and meet other devs.
But, I think somebody else mentioned these guys aren't even paying themselves a salary yet.
Anyone who exhibits at an event for fun is a fool, as is anyone who exhibits at an event but doesn't find it fun. In my experience - and maybe this differs in other industries or indeed other parts of the games industry - events couldn't be further from holidays, most event organisers and exhibitors I know, myself included, would tell you they are the most tiring and most stressful times of the year. But for some of us, that's what makes them enjoyable.
Of course there's fun to mix in and around them in ways that being away from the normality of office life let's you have, but it's generally a case of lletting off steam while working crazily hard, not of enjoying a break from working. My last event consisted of 10 days without a break, 10-12 hours minimum, or 15+ during the 4 days of set-up / pack down, but it was still the most fun I've had recently.
$3k is a lot of ad impressions.
This is largely a function of the unit economics of indie games being terrible compared to e.g. the unit economics of a free to play MMORPG.
A better question might be, "iPads? Why are these people soliciting money from people to make an iPad game when they don't have any experience developing for the iPad?"
They've done iPhone development?