Broken Age Needs More Money

[xdiesp]

How about this: Kickstarter is a fad which preys on the gullible, and wallet-bearing videogame-playing adults are special people which are doubly so. I facepalmed when I got that people weren't actually investing in a product with returns, but donating piles of cash out of love for toys.

 

[Carrots_macduff]

I'm a backer of this project, am I going to get the full game?

Yes - kickstarter backers will still get the second half in a free update

As far as I'm concerned, I got my kickstarter moneys worth just from the documentary videos showing the development process over the last year.

actually you cant guarantee that anyone will get ANYTHING, just because a kickstarter reaches its goal doesnt mean the project will get completed.

consider that before you spend money on an idea broken age backers

 

[Pero]

You all defenders forget one big deal. He made only half of the game judging by this article. That means that he must get at least half percent of original money from people who will buy early access to finish whole product. But I'm afraid not enough people will buy Early access game because a lot of people who would have wanted to play this game already backed it on kickstarter. Without enough people buying early access it's question will there be other half and how will other half look (if it comes out). Idk maybe that's just me but you never know.

 

[Korolev]

Tim is undoubtedly talented and has vision, but the truth is that Double Fine has been in trouble for some time now. The games they've recently released haven't done spectacularly, which makes investment very difficult to get. They also don't put out many games, and I've seen their staff photo - they employ A LOT of people. At some point, those people have to get paid and they need to get paid with the profits of games Double Fine makes.

I think Double Fine has issues - I don't think they have sound management, I don't think they quite know how to crack the whip to get projects done. They have a wealth of talent, but that doesn't automatically translate into success. The Kickstarter money sounds like it's the only money they've received in a long time - I think Double Fine are running off fumes. They're probably looking at Broken Age as their Last Shot - they need it to succeed, so that they can actually make Massive Chalice (no way that game gets finished for 1 million alone) and get back in the black.

I know kickstarter folks are unhappy with this. But I hope Double Fine succeed. They're in a tough spot right now, so I hope that they manage to pull through and create a great game that will justify the kickstarter enthusiasm and ensure that Double Fine creates adventure games well into the future.

 

[Gluzzbung]

Maybe if Tim Schafer focused on one game at a time instead of trying to direct 5 all at once he might not be in this mess. It's pretty much absurd that they're trying to mask the fact that they're running out of money by saying that they'll deliver a 'bigger experience.' People paid for an amply sized game, they don't want something that's excessive and overboard, they just want what they paid for. This has bad management and bad direction mixed with the creators being left to run wild with no idea of the consequences.

 

[Atmos Duality]

How about this: Kickstarter is a fad which preys on the gullible, and wallet-bearing videogame-playing adults are special people which are doubly so. I facepalmed when I got that people weren't actually investing in a product with returns, but donating piles of cash out of love for toys.

I find it more infuriating that with a market as large as gaming, that this is what it has come down to.
It's bankrupt in some way; either creatively or financially.

 

[wulf3n]

That was their first mistake. You don't go to Kickstarter with just "HEY, I want to make a game!",

How was it a mistake? It worked.

you don't go with a publisher with that vague of an idea, you'd get laughed out of their offices, so why should you do any different on Kickstarter?

Why should you? I don't know, but they did, and got what they asked.

I've seen games with playable and enjoyable prototypes fail (ie. Death Inc.) but just on a vague notion of a point and click they bloody get three million? Where is the sense in that. Why should you give all that money to someone who at the time has no idea what he's going to make beyond the genre? Any other person would've had a failed Kickstarter for being vague.

The pros of fan loyalty.

And people were frankly bloody stupid for just going in fully blind and backing Schafer

Are we not allowed to spend our money how we choose?

even though we know full well thanks to Brütal Legend and some other projects that 1) he's perfectly capable of delivering a dud.

If an average review score of 8/10 is a dud, then I'm perfectly happy with any Double Fine dud.

2) prone to falling victim to feature creep when left to his own devices.

Have you been watching Totalbiscuit? It bugged me when he said this as well.

It's not really feature creep [at the very least we can't tell] as we don't know when in production these so called "features" appeared. I get what you're trying to say, the scope of the project was larger than the resources they had, but that's not feature creep.

So really, the backers are at fault for this situation for jumping on it as blindly as they did in the first place, you don't back a project that has nothing to show for itself, that's responsible Kickstarter usage 101.

True, but I've seen no backer complaining. We accepted the fact that this could happen when we backed the project.

Double Fine SHOULD by all means have had a game planned out for $400k when they went to Kickstarter, rather than just the vaguest notion of wanting to make some kinda point & click.

Why?

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

That was their first mistake. You don't go to Kickstarter with just "HEY, I want to make a game!",

How was it a mistake? It worked.

you don't go with a publisher with that vague of an idea, you'd get laughed out of their offices, so why should you do any different on Kickstarter?

Why should you? I don't know, but they did, and got what they asked.

Because I'm beginning to see that Double Fine and War Z fans are quite similar, they're willing to forgive, ignore, dismiss any mistake they make, or just pretend no mistake was ever made. And will gladly accept anything they say as truth without even thinking about doubting their words.
With any other Kickstarter this would've failed, "Oh so you want to make a space sim? Come back when you've got something to show", but no, somehow because it's Tim Bloody Schafer he got away with it.

I've seen games with playable and enjoyable prototypes fail (ie. Death Inc.) but just on a vague notion of a point and click they bloody get three million? Where is the sense in that. Why should you give all that money to someone who at the time has no idea what he's going to make beyond the genre? Any other person would've had a failed Kickstarter for being vague.

The pros of fan loyalty.

Blind fan loyalty, no less.

And people were frankly bloody stupid for just going in fully blind and backing Schafer

Are we not allowed to spend our money how we choose?

Of course you are, just like I'm allowed to point out it was not the wisest decision the backers have ever made.

even though we know full well thanks to Brütal Legend and some other projects that 1) he's perfectly capable of delivering a dud.

If an average review score of 8/10 is a dud, then I'm perfectly happy with any Double Fine dud.

By that logic every Call of Duty is a great game too. Sadly in today's gaming press (and with Metacritic weighing reviews), a high average score isn't necessarily indicative of a high quality game. Brütal Legend tried to do too many things at once and didn't do any of them well. They also attempted to deceive their fans by trying to make it look like mostly an adventure game in the trailers when it was in fact mostly an RTS, a poorly executed RTS. It also didn't help that certain elements of the plot were painfully predictable if you knew your Shakespeare.

So really, the backers are at fault for this situation for jumping on it as blindly as they did in the first place, you don't back a project that has nothing to show for itself, that's responsible Kickstarter usage 101.

True, but I've seen no backer complaining. We accepted the fact that this could happen when we backed the project.

I have, including someone who works in the game industry herself so she knows how those things work.

2) prone to falling victim to feature creep when left to his own devices.

Have you been watching Totalbiscuit? It bugged me when he said this as well.

It's not really feature creep [at the very least we can't tell] as we don't know when in production these so called "features" appeared. I get what you're trying to say, the scope of the project was larger than the resources they had, but that's not feature creep.

Double Fine SHOULD by all means have had a game planned out for $400k when they went to Kickstarter, rather than just the vaguest notion of wanting to make some kinda point & click.

Why?

Because then they wouldn't have been in the situation they were in, the core idea of successfully making a game is to have a solid plan before going in and not deviating from it, or as little as possible. If they had an outline for making a $400k game then they also would've had a better idea about what they could and couldn't afford to do. If they then ended up making as much as they did then they could've better assessed what of their added money could go towards what, and perhaps save the rest aside for marketing, getting booths at trade shows and so on. Now they instead designed for a $3m game and seemingly grossly overestimated how far they could go with $3m and are refusing to compromise on any aspect of the game's development and are now basically trying to get money wherever they can find it, that's clearly a sign of mismanagement, and if you wish for any further evidence that Tim Schafer is the last man you want to put in charge of a budget or a studio, here's a quote from the man himself on Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e0ijv/i_am_a_tim_schafer_ama/c9vlqkm].

The truth is I always act as if I didn't have to worry about profits, had all the money in the world, and no technical limits. Maybe that's why my games are considered "niche," why they go over budget, and why my programmers have to work so hard. So basically, I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing right now!

He's basically George Lucas, great ideas man, great in one aspect of making their craft (special effects and writing dialogue, respectively), but both have their downfalls, like getting too many ideas to put into one project, that need to be held in check by a good producer who is still above them. Have someone like that in place and you end up with A New Hope or Full Throttle. Take that away and well...

 

[wulf3n]

they're willing to forgive, ignore, dismiss any mistake they make, or just pretend no mistake was ever made. And will gladly accept anything they say as truth without even thinking about doubting their words.

I see it more like gambling. If you bet on a horse, and the horse loses you don't blame the trainer or jokey, you accept that you lost and move on.

Of course you are, just like I'm allowed to point out it was not the wisest decision the backers have ever made.

I'm sensing more to it than that. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.

By that logic every Call of Duty is a great game too. Sadly in today's gaming press (and with Metacritic weighing reviews), a high average score isn't necessarily indicative of a high quality game. Brütal Legend tried to do too many things at once and didn't do any of them well. They also attempted to deceive their fans by trying to make it look like mostly an adventure game in the trailers when it was in fact mostly an RTS, a poorly executed RTS. It also didn't help that certain elements of the plot were painfully predictable if you knew your Shakespeare.

Having not played it I can't really say, what I can say however is that quality like most things is subjective, and while you may consider it a dud, there may be many fans who enjoyed it. So the argument of why back them when they make duds only really works if those you're arguing against believe they're duds. If that makes any sense.

I have, including someone who works in the game industry herself so she knows how those things work.

Source? I'm curious to see what arguments[???] an upset backer has.

Because then they wouldn't have been in the situation they were in, the core idea of successfully making a game is to have a solid plan before going in and not deviating from it, or as little as possible. If they had an outline for making a $400k game then they also would've had a better idea about what they could and couldn't afford to do. If they then ended up making as much as they did then they could've better assessed what of their added money could go towards what, and perhaps save the rest aside for marketing, getting booths at trade shows and so on. Now they instead designed for a $3m game and seemingly grossly overestimated how far they could go with $3m and are refusing to compromise on any aspect of the game's development and are now basically trying to get money wherever they can find it, that's clearly a sign of mismanagement, and if you wish for any further evidence that Tim Schafer is the last man you want to put in charge of a budget or a studio, here's a quote from the man himself on Reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e0ijv/i_am_a_tim_schafer_ama/c9vlqkm]

The truth is I always act as if I didn't have to worry about profits, had all the money in the world, and no technical limits. Maybe that's why my games are considered "niche," why they go over budget, and why my programmers have to work so hard. So basically, I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing right now!

I guess it depends on what they [Double Fine] were looking to get out of the kickstarter campaign. If their goal was to release a game using only funds raised by kickstarter then yes, everything you said holds true, however I believe their goal was to make a game without anyone telling them what they can and can't do.

He's basically George Lucas, great ideas man, great in one aspect of making their craft (special effects and writing dialogue, respectively), but both have their downfalls, like getting too many ideas to put into one project, that need to be held in check by a good producer who is still above them. Have someone like that in place and you end up with A New Hope or Full Throttle. Take that away and well...

Time will tell

 

[Tropico1]

Damn, so much Dunning-Kruger in this thread it's almost suffocating. We got everything from the backseat game designers that have never released a game in their 15 years of life, to TotalBiscuit parrots that think the points they're regurgitating are unassailable because they heard them in a deep voice with an English accent.

Yeah guys, you all know more about how to properly release a good game than the guy who made the Monkey Islands, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. That portoflio doesn't count for anything; he should be seen as just any random 20 year old running a Kickstarter to fund his first game ever. You totally know more than him about the motivations behind every decision he makes, and what the exact consequences will be.

Plus you don't actually NEED to wait to see if the game comes out complete or not; you can just announce its failure and how sorry you feel for backers RIGHT NOW. Go ahead and act like it's already failed and give us your future hindsight advice on how he could have made it succeed - it won't be ridiculous at all!

I mean, wow, usually this forum can be counted on for some interesting insights if nothing else, but what a colossal failure it's turned out to be on this topic at least.

 

[crazyarms33]

Yeah guys, you all know more about how to properly release a good game than the guy who made the Monkey Islands, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. That portoflio doesn't count for anything; he should be seen as just any random 20 year old running a Kickstarter to fund his first game ever. You totally know more than him about the motivations behind every decision he makes, and what the exact consequences will be.

So what about his impressive portfolio? I don't see how that enters in at all. He made some great games, so because he is already over budget so much so in fact that the promised original game has to be split in two and based on the sales of part 1, part 2 MIGHT be released, we should forgive it? I must confess to not seeing your logic. Maybe you can clarify for me, because what I understood you said was, "Well he has made some great games so this isn't a big deal."

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

Additionally, you're discounting the fact that with with the Monkey Islands and Day of the Tentacle he was just part of the team rather than the head of the team. It's not like he single handedly made all those masterpieces. And Grim Fandango and Brütal Legend I wouldn't personally count as masterpieces as in my experience they both lose focus after a strong start, so he's already proven that not every game he makes is GOTY material.

Plus it also is a very unhealthy attitude to say that you can't critique anything unless you've done it yourself. By that logic 95% of game reviewers and film critics should be sacked right away. And we as consumers should just sit back and accept games like Duke Nukem Forever or War Z because gee, we've never made games of our own, we should clearly consider these to be good games because they're better than anything we've done by default.

Yeah... no. That'd just lead to an industry where anyone can get away with anything.

 

[Therumancer]

Wow, just wow... this was like the poster child for Kickstarter successes and it seems to have become everything people were afraid of. Seems to me they did something wrong here, decided to produce a far more elaborate product than intended and bit off more than they could chew, or are simply engaging in a cash grab as people feared.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future, but right now I'm scared that we'll see a bunch of people who succeeded on Kickstarter suddenly reveal that after exceeding their goal they have problems and "we need more money or else this project collapses" as a quick cash grab, largely because Tim did it. There is a lot of potential to get people to donate for a popular idea, and then just never do anything with it except ask for more money, holding people's previous donations as ransom to get more money (ie if I don't donate more I lose everything I put in already).

I guess it's paranoia that I think the worst... but well, there it is. This does not make me think highly of Tim or Doublefine, and actually makes me even more wary of the entire Kickstarter concept when this happens with one of it's greatest success stories.

 

[Lightknight]

Then again, if Double Fine would want to decieve you, they would only need to declare the first half of the story to be a finished game (that happens to end with a cliffhanger for "artistic reasons"), and then spend the next two years finishing the other half as "Broken Age 2" the slow way, or even start a new Kickstarter justified by how they "delivered their promise releasing a $3 million game, and now they want to do it again".

The only reason why you even have a chance complain that they might possibly only give you "half a game", is because they were open enough to disclose that they ended up thinking in much bigger than what they are ready to release. There are plenty of games, that cut huge amounts of unfinished material. That doesn't mean that they are all "less than a full game".

The knowledge that at one point during the development they had even bigger plans, doesn't harm you in any way.

Exactly. As long as the backers get both halves then I couldn't care less. And that's what they're giving anyways. The backers already have the full game and this is just a damned smart way to get some early revenue to finish the second half. DF could have just cut out a lot of stuff and made everything shorter, but they're trying to deliver the best product possible and I think that's exactly what we (backers) have asked of them. To do the most with our money possible and part of that is to pursue non-vision compromising avenues to raise other revenue.

I covered this in my last post. All he had to do was hint at this and there is no problem. Let me try explaining one last time, because if this doesn't make it clear I don't think you and I are understanding each other at all.

The game is still being released in full at the same July date they set course for. I'm reading through Tim's comments in the backer forum and they're just planning on polishing up the first half to have it available earlier to help fund the second half to be done in the original deadline. You literally lose nothing. We even still get the exclusive backer early beta access to both versions.

I've been following the game development in the backer forums since day one. They have been hinting for some time (about half way in) that there was a serious problem in the game trajectory in relation to their funds. If you are a backer, take a look at the main episodes from the excellent documentary. From that episode forward, they've been doggedly pursuing ways to cut costs and to bring in revenue to help them with it. Including dumping revenue from other games into it as one of the first things. Have you noticed all the DF bundles on the Humble Bundle and such? Those were directly to feed into this game. I'm genuinely concerned that this could wreck them.

Releasing the game in two segments harms no one. The backer gets both versions and the company sells their product to get revenue to help with the second segment. I believe that they could cut the game drastically short and let that be that. But I think they really want to make the game really polished and true to DoubleFine form. From the looks of things, it was either do this or cut the game by something crazy like 75%.

I'll also add on a personal note that I have gotten more out of my backing already than what I've put in. To the point that I'm genuinely upset that I backed so little. From having direct input into the game that got considered and responded to by the company on the backer-only forums to getting to see the NUMEROUS forum updates from not just videos about the game by take two but also technical and art direction updates in which they explain what they're doing and why.

3.)He can realize his budget has significantly increased and as result he needs to make a higher quality game in order to feel like he didn't let anyone down. Instead of figuring out a way to maximize his available resources, he let's the budget go his head and ends up having to alter the initial premise of the agreement.

I do wonder exactly what happened here. Was the scope of the project too large to begin with or were there unexpected costs that made the project more expensive than anticipated? We see game developers going over budget all the time but it's a more dangerous thing with a kickstarter when you don't have one large and powerful entity that has already dumped their money into the game and so are basically hostages to pay more. With backers, most of us are only in $15 or $20 bucks from what I've seen and we can much more easily count it loss than dump more in.

On the site, Tim takes personal responsibility for designing the game too big but I don't know if that's the only issue. Hopefully they'll do fine and all this will work out for them and end up being a lucrative lesson for next time (while paying them meanwhile). In any event, if you are a backer, check out the backer forum videos. The game is looking very polished. If you're not a backer, become one and you won't be fooled by articles like this.

http://www.doublefine.com/dfapay/

 

[4Aces]

Epic Fail, like so many of the Kickstarter wunder-projects. I love how the ones that just disappear with the money are scrubbed from KS and the net (Google cache). Sure says something about the 12%* that KS is collecting right off the top.

*10% directly off the top, and and the additional 2-2.5% that most believe that Amazon gives back for the exclusivity that KS gives them.