Well, there's still time (and PayPal), so who knows.
Also, regarding A Vampyre Story: Year One's just not a game that people want. Most people tended to skip the original game (myself included - I tried to play it so I could review it and barely lasted an hour before I gave up), and those who did actually play it just wanted the story to continue.
NOBODY was crying out for a prequel. NO-ONE. It just... it seemed like a really bizarre set-up for a game, like it was pretty much all Tiller could actually do thanks to rights or something. But he completely failed to take into account whether it was a thing people really wanted, and I think that's the main reason why it's going to fail.
Also not helping matters was Mona's voice. As I said a while back when the Kickstarter first launched, her new voice is better, but still not exactly good. French accents are hard, and they're not going about it the right way.
I really don't have high hopes for the AVS kickstarter. I mean, a game with an unfinished story gets a prequel that's only going to be the first episode out of four? Why would anyone want such a pile of uncompleteness? I'm really not going to back that, as much as I love Tiller's artworks.
That's it, seriously. Game devs MUST LEARN to tell self contained, complete stories and not try to fuck the player and his wallet with continuous cliffhanger/prequel/sequel paradigms until it's finally clear that the story was never even meant to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Dissatisfaction and lack of closure: guaranteed.
I think the interest level was just way too low. Nobody played the original Vampire Story and those who did weren't looking for a prequel. I think he would have had better luck if he started from scratch and promoted a new adventure from the artist behind Curse of Monkey Island
It's called Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island and it's terrible. The artwork is great but the characters are unlikeable. The accents are terrible. I don't feel a strong attachment to any of the protagonists; the closest one to being heroic is the girl pirate but characterization is bad and split between three figures, so you feel invested in none of them. He's a good artist but a bad story teller.
Also, sometimes I feel a lot of these developers really think they're the hot shit because of what they did a decade ago.
It's called Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island and it's terrible. The artwork is great but the characters are unlikeable. The accents are terrible. I don't feel a strong attachment to any of the protagonists; the closest one to being heroic is the girl pirate but characterization is bad and split between three figures, so you feel invested in none of them. He's a good artist but a bad story teller.
I'm just saying, if he had pitched the premise of Ghost Pirates as a kickstarter (assuming the original Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island never existed), he would totally have gotten it funded. Not saying that it would have been good, but it would have gotten people interested enough. I totally understand his desire to expand a universe that he has a lot of ideas for, but it would have been wise to go with a much more standalone side-story, if not something totally new.
I haven't actually played any of this guy's games, but it does seem like he'd benefit hugely from aligning himself with an established writer.
I personally think there's ways to tell an interesting prequel. But this one didn't sound interesting. It sounded dull. Seems I was not alone with this assessment.
I replayed first half of a Vampyre Story this week. It's not as bad as I remember. Mona's voice is passable, she just needs to talk less. Heck, they all need to talk less. The game has a lot of dialog and it gets boring fast. Only a third of the jokes are funny, the rest are way too corny or predictable, so there's plenty of eyerolling. (I even had this idea to make a mod that cuts some lines and simplifies a puzzle or two.)
There's a lot of walking around and solving puzzles just for the sake of solving puzzles. The characters aren't too bad, they just don't have much to do. There's not much of a goal, just a lot of busywork. In fact, the info on the prequel is pretty vague with the overall goal too. Remember when you had to save a lady from a demon ghost zombie pirate? Or that time you used time travel to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world? Exciting, eh? What's A Vampyre Story:Year One about? Oh, right, stopping three bats from bullying another bat. And maybe something with a talking lady spider. And in the same castle we had in the previous games, but with a bunch of new rooms. Seriously? Who wants that?
Let's say a Kickstarter game campaign successfully meets its funding goal. Then, nearly 8 months later and without having almost anything of the game to show to backers, the game developer mentions that he's considering a SECOND Kickstarter for the same game, since it looks like he'd probably need more money to successfully complete the game.
That essentially describes Corey Cole of the Hero-U project. I am a backer, but I'm starting to have doubts about the development team.
Surely a second Kickstarter in this way would be unprecedented.
How would you all react? Would it be no big deal if it means a better game? Would it lower Cole's standing in your eyes?
My reaction would be: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
No... it would, pretty much, be outrageous. When you're doing a Kickstarter , you're supposed to name a very specific number, one that says "with this money, we can do it". This is one of the central characteristics of Kickstarter as opposed to other crowd funding platforms. Crowd funding normally is "we're doing this, who's in?"; Kickstarter is "If you're in, we can do this". The Kickstarter guys specifically demand that you set this bar so high that the project WILL be finished.
If you find out you need significantly more money for your project... you haven't been an able project manager when you set up the project, you should have known that this is not your area of expertise, and you shouldn't have made the Kickstarter.
It would lower not only Hero-U's reputation, but also that of the team behind it and, as a knock-on effect, it would lower the public's trust in Kickstarter's crowdfunding method - if one project does this, what's to stop others?
Bad as it would be, I'd rather they admit defeat and end the project than launch an additional Kickstarter. People would be upset, sure, but better that then insulted.
It would lower not only Hero-U's reputation, but also that of the team behind it and, as a knock-on effect, it would lower the public's trust in Kickstarter's crowdfunding method - if one project does this, what's to stop others?
It was bound to happen eventually. Not every project can succeed and not every creative 'name' in the game industry does well on the steering wheel.
Again: Kickstarter has put these rules in place to absolutely ensure that the goal reached means that the project is completed. This is a risky prescription for them to devise: some 'flexible funding' platforms do not even know 'failed campaigns'. Every single dollar pledged goes towards the project, and the platform gets its share of every single dollar, but can of course not be held liable for whatever the campaign host does or does not do with the money.
Kickstarter's inflexibility in that respect is a bold decision that has quite some advantages for the pledger. When popular project organizers - like the Coles - start failing to deliver on their promises despite Kickstarter's rare concern for actually seeing all projects through, the platform is naturally damaged more than others. Looking at Kickstarter's singular success with my rising concern about their dominance in the market, I would have welcomed very visible dents in their chassis. Yet not in an area that actually is Kickstarter's strength and geared towards the pledger.
Also not helping matters was Mona's voice. As I said a while back when the Kickstarter first launched, her new voice is better, but still not exactly good.
I disagree about her voice being better. I think the original was better.
No, it's really not. Hell, when I read what you wrote I thought you were talking about the second Dropsy campaign.
Not really.
The goal for my original Kickstarter was $225 for a single piece of software. The end result exceeded my expectations and I ended up with $1600. That was cool, and it allowed me to purchase a computer after my older one took a dump a few months after to continue development. After working with the program (Multimedia Fusion II) for a few months I realized that what I was trying to accomplish was wayyyy out of the range of the program's abilities.
At that point, I consulted a programmer (who also happened to be my best friend) and decided to allow him to continue it in Unity. From that point, I decided to increase the scope of the game slightly and add on an animator and co-composer. This frees me up to work exclusively on art and music, which I love doing.
I've been working on this game nearly every day since that first Kickstarter. It looks bad that we don't have anything playable up - I'll give you that - but that's simply because I'm not a programmer. I have a metric crapload of art, and as my backers will see in some upcoming videos, the game is quite meticulously and extensively planned out.
Kickstarter has a reputation for hacks taking money and running, but I assure you that this isn't the case.
Questria Princess Destiny http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/questria-princess-destiny/x/181218 Something about this feels familar
Questria: Princess Destiny is Life Simulation Game for all age groups.
You play as Sirelestia, ruler of Questria; you enact policies and decrees to help guide the princess-in-waiting’s TwiBright choices.
Could you provide a link or details? This sounds interesting.
Short version: They ran out of money, will need more to finish the second half of the game, will obtain these funds by selling Early Access on Steam and then providing an update with the second half when funding is obtained.
If you aren't a backer, here's the full text of the relevant section:
A Note from Tim
Hello, Backers of Adventure!
Those of you who have been following along in the documentary know about the design vs. money tension we’ve had on this project since the early days. Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn’t stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money.
I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it’s hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There’s just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.
So we have been looking for ways to improve our project’s efficiency while reducing scope where we could along the way. All while looking for additional funds from bundle revenue, ports, etc. But when we finished the final in-depth schedule recently it was clear that these opportunistic methods weren’t going to be enough.
We looked into what it would take to finish just first half of our game—Act 1. And the numbers showed it coming in July of next year. Not this July, but July 2014. For just the first half. The full game was looking like 2015! My jaw hit the floor.
This was a huge wake-up call for all of us. If this were true, we weren’t going to have to cut the game in half, we were going to have to cut it down by 75%! What would be left? How would we even cut it down that far? Just polish up the rooms we had and ship those? Reboot the art style with a dramatically simpler look? Remove the Boy or Girl from the story? Yikes! Sad faces all around.
Would we, instead, try to find more money? You guys have been been very generous in the tip jar (thanks!) but this is a larger sum of money we were talking about. Asking a publisher for the money was out of the question because it would violate the spirit of the Kickstarter, and also, publishers. Going back to Kickstarter for it seemed wrong. Clearly, any overages were going to have to be paid by Double Fine, with our own money from the sales of our other games. That actually makes a lot of sense and we feel good about it. We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough.
Then we had a strange idea. What if we made some modest cuts in order to finish the first half of the game by January instead of July, and then released that finished, polished half of the game on Steam Early Access? Backers would still have the option of not looking at it, of course, but those who were sick of waiting wouldn’t have to wait any more. They could play the first half of the game in January!
We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development. The second part of the game would come in a free update a few months down the road, closer to April-May.
So, everybody gets to play the game sooner, and we don’t have to cut the game down drastically. Backers still get the whole game this way—nobody has to pay again for the second half.
And whatever date we start selling the early release, backers still have exclusive beta access before that, as promised in the Kickstarter.
I want to point out that Broken Age’s schedule changes have nothing to do with the team working slowly. They have been kicking ass and the game looks, plays, and sounds amazing. It’s just taking a while because I designed too much game, as I pretty much always do. But we’re pulling it in, and the good news is that the game’s design is now 100% done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger.
With this shipping solution I think we’re balancing the size of the game and the realities of funding it pretty well. We are still working out the details and exact dates, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. This project has always been something we go through together and the ultimate solution needs to be something we all feel good about.
In the meantime, I’m hoping you are enjoying the documentary and like the progress you’re seeing on Broken Age. I’m really exciting about how it’s coming together, I can’t wait for you to see more of it, and I feel good about finally having a solid plan on how to ship it!
It is a different team, but yeah, this kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. Of course they waited until the second Kickstarter ended and now people are going to question whether the money for that game is actually all going to go to that project.
It doesn't really bother me that much as I've seen other Kickstarters go much much worse(one I minimally backed is worth it just to read the updates and comments/hilarious). After reading it, I just cocked my head and said "Really? Double Fine? Really?", but that's about it. Eh. It better be good, Tim.
I wouldn't go getting too worried or worked up over it. This sort of thing happens, and small developers get into situations like this quite often, and cut things very fine budget wise. (Take a look at Frictional's 'Amnesia' development, for instance.) I know people are going to get a little more uppity over this, simply because it's fan funds, but I think that's just immature. People need to accept that stuff like this happens, no matter how much money you've got to work with, and regardless of where it came from.
Yeah, it's honestly not a big deal. Projects go over budget, and he's not asking for more money from Kickstarter backers to cover it. He's covering it through the studio's money and from additional sales of the game through Steam Early Access.
Part of this project is showing what goes on behind the scenes in development, and budgetary concerns are a huge part of any development team. It will certainly make for an interesting, and honest, look into development during that portion of the documentary.
Since backers will get Steam Early Access for no additional cost, and they'll still get the promised beta even earlier, it's definitely a no harm, no foul situation.
They asked for 400,000$, got more than 3 million, and got to overexcited and overscoped things. I'm sure Double Fine is smart enough to take this into account from now on and not repeat the mistake in the future.
Ah its only this way because its a proper game though, (what we all wanted!), and again Tim's a pretty clever fella and he's found the best solution here.
(And in a way its good to expose the game to more people anyway.)
On Double Fine. I think this dovetails with the concern everybody ALREADY had about them starting a SECOND kickstarter for their other game. Thereby being an irksome situation.
I'll admit I wish the game was done by now, but if this is what it takes to make an adventure game with the scope of the classics I love, I'm fine with it taking longer and requiring a bigger budget. This is really only an issue that we know about because of the unique insight into the production we have because of the Kickstarter and the promise of backer updates.
I think what is probably more of a reason for concern is that the early access will be Steam exclusive. I understand that there are practical reasons for it and personally I don't have a problem with it, but I do understand that this could be upsetting to some.
I'll admit I wish the game was done by now, but if this is what it takes to make an adventure game with the scope of the classics I love, I'm fine with it taking longer and requiring a bigger budget.
Your stance is commendable, but it unfortunately is based on an incorrect assumption. For comparison, Daedalic Entertainment routinely makes adventure games much with the scope of the classics at a budget of 500,000€ per game with far less manpower and far less developed industry contacts, far more detailed graphics and animation, and they now release about two or three games per year.
Tim Schafer still is my creative hero, but it is the very unfortunate truth that at the helm of Double Fine, in charge of any kind of project management, he is very obviously incapable. A 2D adventure game is about the most projectable game there is. 3.1 million $ as a starting point (Kickstarter percentage already deduced) is a gift from heaven. Eight months of planned production time (hence 387,500$ per month) was a rather tight schedule, but still doable. How could one possibly run an easy development project like this into the ground?
Yet, what do we have now? An ETA of mid July 2014 at the earliest, bringing the originally planned 8 months of development time to at least 28 and therewith the original planned costs from these three million dollars to about 11,000,000$. That's the number you haven't heard yet, but that's the money development time will burn with their calculations when they take until mid 2014 to finish with the same staff strength. If they take until 2015 even, Tim will have blown up the tiny adventure game project to 15 or even 20 million. That's not a ludicrous calculation. I've worked as a project manager for five years now and I say that's what Tim is doing because he might have developed his creative skills a lot in these last years, but was obviously never interested in realistic project planning. Which is absolutely OK for a creative genius, but absolutely disastrous for a company founder.
Selling half the game on Steam won't bring ANYTHING near the necessary 6 to 10 million dollars. What you get in return will still just be a game with halfway adequate yet certainly cost effective graphics. It won't be epic in length. You will not be able to really see where that kind of money went, because it is a badly planned project in which milestones were always missed and the design stage was never final.
You want Tim Schafer as the lead of your creative team, you really do. But without a superior slapping his fingers hard when he doesn't deliver on his milestones, I'm certain that failure is his constant companion.
Whoah, didn't even bring Steam into the equation this rant round. Ah, next time.
Yeah, hrm. This doesn't bother me or offend me, since it's cool to have a bigger game to look forward to, and I'm not in a hurry. But it does worry me. It'll be sad if they just can't make it work. I certainly trust them to be earnest and to make well-intentioned decisions, but I can't totally trust them to make good financial decisions.
That said, even in the worst case scenario, the documentary guys may end up with the perfect footage for the "Lost in La Mancha" of game design. This Kickstarter wasn't all about the game, it was about the ups and downs of the process of how a game is made from scratch, and we're certainly seeing that.
Very good points about Daedalic, Vainamoinen. They certainly could have done a lot with $2.5 million.
Very good points about Daedalic, Vainamoinen. They certainly could have done a lot with $2.5 million.
I didn't know half of it. This from the facebook page of Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder [my translation]:
I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna's Breakout, Harvey's New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav's Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we'd do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it's alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.
Original quote: "Ich muss leider zugeben, dass Edna Bricht Aus, Harveys Neue Augen, 1,5 Ritter, Deponia, Chaos auf Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinavs Ketten, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz und The Night of the Rabbit zusammen keine 3 Mio. Euro gekostet haben. Das sind 11 Adventures mit einer durchschnittlichen Länge von im Regelfall über 10 Stunden. Kein Titel ist Mittelmaß! Ich hab keine Ahnung was wir mit 3M machen würden. Ein Heavy Rain vielleicht. Soll ich deprimiert sein? Ich glaube nicht. Eines Tages werden wir ein Spiel für 3M machen. Bedenklich finde ich nur, dass TS 0,3M US Dollar haben wollte und nun 3M nicht ausreichen. Deponia 1-3 ist übrigens über 40 STUNDEN (!) lang und international überall konkurrenzfähig..."
Watched the documentary now (sorry non-backers) and while there's definitely still an overall budgeting/scheduling problem at Double Fine, I feel better about the choice they've made here. The "right" answer to their problem would be to cut the scope of the game in half, to make a smaller game within the budget that they have. And Part 1 is that smaller game, effectively. Then Part 2 will be on top of that, from that money. But we'll see how it plays out.
I didn't know half of it. This from the facebook page of Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder [my translation]:
Original quote: "Ich muss leider zugeben, dass Edna Bricht Aus, Harveys Neue Augen, 1,5 Ritter, Deponia, Chaos auf Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinavs Ketten, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz und The Night of the Rabbit zusammen keine 3 Mio. Euro gekostet haben. Das sind 11 Adventures mit einer durchschnittlichen Länge von im Regelfall über 10 Stunden. Kein Titel ist Mittelmaß! Ich hab keine Ahnung was wir mit 3M machen würden. Ein Heavy Rain vielleicht. Soll ich deprimiert sein? Ich glaube nicht. Eines Tages werden wir ein Spiel für 3M machen. Bedenklich finde ich nur, dass TS 0,3M US Dollar haben wollte und nun 3M nicht ausreichen. Deponia 1-3 ist übrigens über 40 STUNDEN (!) lang und international überall konkurrenzfähig..."
I've hand drawn 70 backgrounds, tons of animation loops, and now need to fork over a few thousand for music and painting. The licensed engine is 1200. Voice acting would put in a few thousand.
I didn't know half of it. This from the facebook page of Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder [my translation]:
Original quote: "Ich muss leider zugeben, dass Edna Bricht Aus, Harveys Neue Augen, 1,5 Ritter, Deponia, Chaos auf Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinavs Ketten, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz und The Night of the Rabbit zusammen keine 3 Mio. Euro gekostet haben. Das sind 11 Adventures mit einer durchschnittlichen Länge von im Regelfall über 10 Stunden. Kein Titel ist Mittelmaß! Ich hab keine Ahnung was wir mit 3M machen würden. Ein Heavy Rain vielleicht. Soll ich deprimiert sein? Ich glaube nicht. Eines Tages werden wir ein Spiel für 3M machen. Bedenklich finde ich nur, dass TS 0,3M US Dollar haben wollte und nun 3M nicht ausreichen. Deponia 1-3 ist übrigens über 40 STUNDEN (!) lang und international überall konkurrenzfähig..."
Did he delete this post from his facebook, or do I just suck at looking? I wanted to link it in another forum because it really is an astounding quote.
I wonder if Daedalic is looking at crowd-funding after this. I would love to see what they could do with half of BA's budget, if only to see better localization. Hearing the English songs in Deponia is painful.
Nope, I didn't post it on the AT forums - but the post there indeed was my source for the quote. I asked for the exact context, but wasn't provided with it. The Daedalics have a very keen eye on that forum though (to the point where all the directors/PR people have and use a registered account there). Should there be any kind of offical denial that this quote is genuine, I'll delete that post up there quick as a flash. The information, however, has at least reached one other gamer community I know of.
Your stance is commendable, but it unfortunately is based on an incorrect assumption. For comparison, Daedalic Entertainment routinely makes adventure games much with the scope of the classics at a budget of 500,000€ per game with far less manpower and far less developed industry contacts, far more detailed graphics and animation, and they now release about two or three games per year.
Daedalic certainly deserves all kinds of praise for constantly delivering quality games. I've played and (mostly) enjoyed the Whispered World, Deponia 1 & 2 and own both Edna & Harvey games, Chains of Satinav and A New Beginning. That they are able to produce those games with such modest budgets is impressive.
I haven't seen more detailed graphics and animation in any of the Daedalic games that I've played than what little I've seen of Broken Age as a backer of DFA though. And that's certainly a huge reason why Broken Age is over budget now. Daedalic has found a place artistically where they can produce games that looks very pleasing visually with hand painted backgrounds with a great amount of details in them, but the characters are a bit flat in comparison. Background objects with movements are also fairly simple with mostly static objects that cycle through short loops of animation. I'm not an artist and don't know anything about the technical terms or what goes into producing them, but some of the things I've seen in Broken Age looks far more impressive to me as a layman. You have people spending days on making puffs of particles come out of a cloud when it's stepped on, custom creating facial expressions for one off situations and probably weeks or months on creating a realistic looking lighting setup that creates dynamic lighting on 2D rendered characters and reacts differently to different in game material textures. Sure it's insane, and I have no problem understanding that it doesn't seem fair to Carsten Fichtelmann, but I'm infinitely more excited about the visuals of this game than any Daedalic game.
Tim Schafer still is my creative hero, but it is the very unfortunate truth that at the helm of Double Fine, in charge of any kind of project management, he is very obviously incapable.
As CEO of Double Fine it's ultimately his problem, but he's not project manager on this project and indeed he has let his creative visions run off with him. I don't think they've lost control though, and as long as they're able to deliver eventually I'm actually fine with this. I rather he makes the game he wants than make it on the original budget.
A 2D adventure game is about the most projectable game there is. 3.1 million $ as a starting point (Kickstarter percentage already deduced) is a gift from heaven. Eight months of planned production time (hence 387,500$ per month) was a rather tight schedule, but still doable. How could one possibly run an easy development project like this into the ground?
Yet, what do we have now? An ETA of mid July 2014 at the earliest, bringing the originally planned 8 months of development time to at least 28 and therewith the original planned costs from these three million dollars to about 11,000,000$. That's the number you haven't heard yet, but that's the money development time will burn with their calculations when they take until mid 2014 to finish with the same staff strength. If they take until 2015 even, Tim will have blown up the tiny adventure game project to 15 or even 20 million. That's not a ludicrous calculation. I've worked as a project manager for five years now and I say that's what Tim is doing because he might have developed his creative skills a lot in these last years, but was obviously never interested in realistic project planning. Which is absolutely OK for a creative genius, but absolutely disastrous for a company founder.
For Daedalic who has their tools and have perfected their production cycle a 2D game is very projectable. For Double Fine there's a lot more to this project than creating a 2D adventure. They are making on a framework they have no previous experience with and has had to create tools from scratch. There's also a lot of optimizations involved with getting the game to run smoothly on both Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. It might not be too exciting for anyone backing just for the game, but they are planning on releasing their tools publicly, which is an added bonus for anyone interested in using them to make games.
I won't deny that this project has burned a lot more money than anticipated, but your calculations are a little off. You base them on their game budget having been $3.1M after the Kickstarter and that money running out after 8 months. After Kickstarter rewards and paying 2PP their cut, what they had to work with was $2.2M and in a backer update from earlier this year they were expecting to run out of funding by July, which makes about 16 months. That makes a budget well short of $4M with continued production until July next year. And then of course there's 2PP on top of that. And with design near complete and tool chain done and integrated I think they're looking at a more predictable future scope that makes the current $6-$10M estimate more accurate.
Selling half the game on Steam won't bring ANYTHING near the necessary 6 to 10 million dollars. What you get in return will still just be a game with halfway adequate yet certainly cost effective graphics. It won't be epic in length. You will not be able to really see where that kind of money went, because it is a badly planned project in which milestones were always missed and the design stage was never final.
They're not selling half the game on Steam though. What they're planning on releasing in January is a fully polished first act of the game. And if it's one thing I'm willing to bet on with this game it is that the graphics are far from "cost effective".
You want Tim Schafer as the lead of your creative team, you really do. But without a superior slapping his fingers hard when he doesn't deliver on his milestones, I'm certain that failure is his constant companion.
I know it seems like I'm disagreeing with you on a lot of stuff here, but you make good points and I don't think Tim Schafer will be remembered for his exceptional business skills. A lot of us wouldn't have it any other way though. I'm sure the business guys and marketing people at Double Fine are pulling their hair out in frustration over a lot of his decisions, but as long as they have enough of a rein on him that he's not running the company into the ground I think that letting him follow his creative vision is the best outcome. Double Fine has a lot riding on the potential success of this Kickstarter and they've built skills, tools and experience that would make any new adventure games a lot more cost efficient. Already some Amnesia Fortnight prototypes and the iOS game Middle Manager of Justice has come of their experience with MOAI. I'm very excited to see what might come next. Even more excited than I was when I heard that Telltale Games was making Sam & Max season 1.
Nope, I didn't post it on the AT forums - but the post there indeed was my source for the quote. I asked for the exact context, but wasn't provided with it. The Daedalics have a very keen eye on that forum though (to the point where all the directors/PR people have and use a registered account there). Should there be any kind of offical denial that this quote is genuine, I'll delete that post up there quick as a flash. The information, however, has at least reached one other gamer community I know of.
Yeah, sorry about that. I just skimmed through that thread and got that mixed up with your post. I didn't think that you would have fabricated something like that anyway. I don't know how Facebook works, but I'm guessing the most likely explanation is that Carsten Fichtelmann indeed posted that, regretted it and then deleted it.
I'm not used to writing long posts in English and my Firefox spell checker suddenly isn't working, so let me know if there's a bunch of typos and nonsense in this post.
I haven't seen more detailed graphics and animation in any of the Daedalic games that I've played than what little I've seen of Broken Age as a backer of DFA though. And that's certainly a huge reason why Broken Age is over budget now.
I'm really not so sure what to think of those graphics. It's essentially a bobble head technology they're using, which - compared to Daedalics 'real' animation - is certainly a bit faster and cheaper to churn out. I rather believe that the mere planning stage went on for the entirety of those last 15 months, wasting a whole lot of money on concepts and prototypes which were eventually scrapped. But there are many ways to burn money for nothing in such a project. Many, many.
Daedalic has found a place artistically where they can produce games that looks very pleasing visually with hand painted backgrounds with a great amount of details in them, but the characters are a bit flat in comparison. Background objects with movements are also fairly simple with mostly static objects that cycle through short loops of animation.
It's certainly true that they re-use a lot; it's certainly true that they don't make adventures "from the ground up" any more; their engine is fixed, and it took them many a year and many a game to get the darn thing running halfway properly. Also, there's the constant rumor of grinding interns and very low payment for their employees. So it's not as if there aren't grey to black patches in the way Daedalic operates. If you explain how they're so darn cost effective, you could certainly say a few unpleasing things.
Sure it's insane, and I have no problem understanding that it doesn't seem fair to Carsten Fichtelmann, but I'm infinitely more excited about the visuals of this game than any Daedalic game.
It's funny, because I really wasn't. The last update showed some really interesting scenes though, so I'll reserve final judgement for later. Still... it IS a cutout/bobble head type of animation, and it IS more cost effective than hand drawn animation in any case.
As CEO of Double Fine it's ultimately his problem, but he's not project manager on this project and indeed he has let his creative visions run off with him. I don't think they've lost control though, and as long as they're able to deliver eventually I'm actually fine with this. I rather he makes the game he wants than make it on the original budget.
I have great trouble bringing Tim's "We're fine financially" tweet in line with what is happening right now. The game has turned episodic; only 30% of funding will have come from the backers; the first half will be Steam exclusive even to backers; it will be sold on the "Early Access" channel, which is unfitting for the advertised "fully polished first half" of the game and rather tries to suggest a kind of exclusivity. These are the same measures a desperate publisher would revert to when a game's budget is exploding, including the cliffhanger. So what have we gained through Kickstarter and the coveted independence? Nothing. For the project which supposedly is the big bang of crowd funded games, that's absurdly disappointing.
I won't deny that this project has burned a lot more money than anticipated, but your calculations are a little off.
I've seen this calculation elsewhere yesterday and I do agree with it mostly (although 2PP will likely earn more money through the now insanely prolonged development cycle). And I do agree that they'll very likely finish this project in a 6 to 10M budget should such funds be available to them.
I'm sure the business guys and marketing people at Double Fine are pulling their hair out in frustration over a lot of his decisions, but as long as they have enough of a rein on him that he's not running the company into the ground I think that letting him follow his creative vision is the best outcome.
I hope it, I really do. But if Schafer doesn't get this kind of money through his lord and savior Steam, we're LOOKING at a company run into the ground.
Just like I encourage Schafer to keep fighting for his game, I encourage the donors to keep fighting for what Kickstarter stands for in games. Kickstarter can’t fail. We can’t let it fail or the bad guys, the anti artists, will win.
Wow, just wow. The bad guys. The "anti artists". The Kickstarter Nazis so to speak. It's us or them!! Stand together for patriotismChristianityheterosexuality Kickstarterism! If you ever had doubts that this guy brings his political views into gaming, well... here we are. No, TenNapel, I won't cheer to Tim Schafer for being a bad businessman. Because there's nothing for anyone if games are too expensive and never finished. And Kickstarter "stands for" absolutely nothing any more if the dire self inflicted financial situation forces independent studios into the exact same bullshit decisions of a publisher. Tim is not dreaming the dream, he's ruining it!
I didn't know half of it. This from the facebook page of Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder [my translation]:
snip
Alright, that does put things in perspective... thanks for posting that! I've assumed Daedalic's games were MUCH more expensive to make than that. And this does shed a very weird light on DF.
Comments
Also, regarding A Vampyre Story: Year One's just not a game that people want. Most people tended to skip the original game (myself included - I tried to play it so I could review it and barely lasted an hour before I gave up), and those who did actually play it just wanted the story to continue.
NOBODY was crying out for a prequel. NO-ONE. It just... it seemed like a really bizarre set-up for a game, like it was pretty much all Tiller could actually do thanks to rights or something. But he completely failed to take into account whether it was a thing people really wanted, and I think that's the main reason why it's going to fail.
Also not helping matters was Mona's voice. As I said a while back when the Kickstarter first launched, her new voice is better, but still not exactly good. French accents are hard, and they're not going about it the right way.
Quoting Laserschwert:
That's it, seriously. Game devs MUST LEARN to tell self contained, complete stories and not try to fuck the player and his wallet with continuous cliffhanger/prequel/sequel paradigms until it's finally clear that the story was never even meant to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Dissatisfaction and lack of closure: guaranteed.
This pitch is plain shit.
It's called Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island and it's terrible. The artwork is great but the characters are unlikeable. The accents are terrible. I don't feel a strong attachment to any of the protagonists; the closest one to being heroic is the girl pirate but characterization is bad and split between three figures, so you feel invested in none of them. He's a good artist but a bad story teller.
Also, sometimes I feel a lot of these developers really think they're the hot shit because of what they did a decade ago.
I'm just saying, if he had pitched the premise of Ghost Pirates as a kickstarter (assuming the original Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island never existed), he would totally have gotten it funded. Not saying that it would have been good, but it would have gotten people interested enough. I totally understand his desire to expand a universe that he has a lot of ideas for, but it would have been wise to go with a much more standalone side-story, if not something totally new.
I haven't actually played any of this guy's games, but it does seem like he'd benefit hugely from aligning himself with an established writer.
I replayed first half of a Vampyre Story this week. It's not as bad as I remember. Mona's voice is passable, she just needs to talk less. Heck, they all need to talk less. The game has a lot of dialog and it gets boring fast. Only a third of the jokes are funny, the rest are way too corny or predictable, so there's plenty of eyerolling. (I even had this idea to make a mod that cuts some lines and simplifies a puzzle or two.)
There's a lot of walking around and solving puzzles just for the sake of solving puzzles. The characters aren't too bad, they just don't have much to do. There's not much of a goal, just a lot of busywork. In fact, the info on the prequel is pretty vague with the overall goal too. Remember when you had to save a lady from a demon ghost zombie pirate? Or that time you used time travel to stop a mutated tentacle from taking over the world? Exciting, eh? What's A Vampyre Story:Year One about? Oh, right, stopping three bats from bullying another bat. And maybe something with a talking lady spider. And in the same castle we had in the previous games, but with a bunch of new rooms. Seriously? Who wants that?
That essentially describes Corey Cole of the Hero-U project. I am a backer, but I'm starting to have doubts about the development team.
Surely a second Kickstarter in this way would be unprecedented.
How would you all react? Would it be no big deal if it means a better game? Would it lower Cole's standing in your eyes?
My reaction would be: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
If you find out you need significantly more money for your project... you haven't been an able project manager when you set up the project, you should have known that this is not your area of expertise, and you shouldn't have made the Kickstarter.
Bad as it would be, I'd rather they admit defeat and end the project than launch an additional Kickstarter. People would be upset, sure, but better that then insulted.
It was bound to happen eventually. Not every project can succeed and not every creative 'name' in the game industry does well on the steering wheel.
Again: Kickstarter has put these rules in place to absolutely ensure that the goal reached means that the project is completed. This is a risky prescription for them to devise: some 'flexible funding' platforms do not even know 'failed campaigns'. Every single dollar pledged goes towards the project, and the platform gets its share of every single dollar, but can of course not be held liable for whatever the campaign host does or does not do with the money.
Kickstarter's inflexibility in that respect is a bold decision that has quite some advantages for the pledger. When popular project organizers - like the Coles - start failing to deliver on their promises despite Kickstarter's rare concern for actually seeing all projects through, the platform is naturally damaged more than others. Looking at Kickstarter's singular success with my rising concern about their dominance in the market, I would have welcomed very visible dents in their chassis. Yet not in an area that actually is Kickstarter's strength and geared towards the pledger.
Not really.
The goal for my original Kickstarter was $225 for a single piece of software. The end result exceeded my expectations and I ended up with $1600. That was cool, and it allowed me to purchase a computer after my older one took a dump a few months after to continue development. After working with the program (Multimedia Fusion II) for a few months I realized that what I was trying to accomplish was wayyyy out of the range of the program's abilities.
At that point, I consulted a programmer (who also happened to be my best friend) and decided to allow him to continue it in Unity. From that point, I decided to increase the scope of the game slightly and add on an animator and co-composer. This frees me up to work exclusively on art and music, which I love doing.
I've been working on this game nearly every day since that first Kickstarter. It looks bad that we don't have anything playable up - I'll give you that - but that's simply because I'm not a programmer. I have a metric crapload of art, and as my backers will see in some upcoming videos, the game is quite meticulously and extensively planned out.
Kickstarter has a reputation for hacks taking money and running, but I assure you that this isn't the case.
That said, thanks for thinking of me anyway.
Questria: Princess Destiny is Life Simulation Game for all age groups.
You play as Sirelestia, ruler of Questria; you enact policies and decrees to help guide the princess-in-waiting’s TwiBright choices.
Could you provide a link or details? This sounds interesting.
If you're a backer, you can see the update here.
If you aren't a backer, here's the full text of the relevant section:
A Note from Tim
Hello, Backers of Adventure!
Those of you who have been following along in the documentary know about the design vs. money tension we’ve had on this project since the early days. Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn’t stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money.
I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it’s hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There’s just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.
So we have been looking for ways to improve our project’s efficiency while reducing scope where we could along the way. All while looking for additional funds from bundle revenue, ports, etc. But when we finished the final in-depth schedule recently it was clear that these opportunistic methods weren’t going to be enough.
We looked into what it would take to finish just first half of our game—Act 1. And the numbers showed it coming in July of next year. Not this July, but July 2014. For just the first half. The full game was looking like 2015! My jaw hit the floor.
This was a huge wake-up call for all of us. If this were true, we weren’t going to have to cut the game in half, we were going to have to cut it down by 75%! What would be left? How would we even cut it down that far? Just polish up the rooms we had and ship those? Reboot the art style with a dramatically simpler look? Remove the Boy or Girl from the story? Yikes! Sad faces all around.
Would we, instead, try to find more money? You guys have been been very generous in the tip jar (thanks!) but this is a larger sum of money we were talking about. Asking a publisher for the money was out of the question because it would violate the spirit of the Kickstarter, and also, publishers. Going back to Kickstarter for it seemed wrong. Clearly, any overages were going to have to be paid by Double Fine, with our own money from the sales of our other games. That actually makes a lot of sense and we feel good about it. We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough.
Then we had a strange idea. What if we made some modest cuts in order to finish the first half of the game by January instead of July, and then released that finished, polished half of the game on Steam Early Access? Backers would still have the option of not looking at it, of course, but those who were sick of waiting wouldn’t have to wait any more. They could play the first half of the game in January!
We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development. The second part of the game would come in a free update a few months down the road, closer to April-May.
So, everybody gets to play the game sooner, and we don’t have to cut the game down drastically. Backers still get the whole game this way—nobody has to pay again for the second half.
And whatever date we start selling the early release, backers still have exclusive beta access before that, as promised in the Kickstarter.
I want to point out that Broken Age’s schedule changes have nothing to do with the team working slowly. They have been kicking ass and the game looks, plays, and sounds amazing. It’s just taking a while because I designed too much game, as I pretty much always do. But we’re pulling it in, and the good news is that the game’s design is now 100% done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger.
With this shipping solution I think we’re balancing the size of the game and the realities of funding it pretty well. We are still working out the details and exact dates, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. This project has always been something we go through together and the ultimate solution needs to be something we all feel good about.
In the meantime, I’m hoping you are enjoying the documentary and like the progress you’re seeing on Broken Age. I’m really exciting about how it’s coming together, I can’t wait for you to see more of it, and I feel good about finally having a solid plan on how to ship it!
Thanks for reading,
Tim
It doesn't really bother me that much as I've seen other Kickstarters go much much worse(one I minimally backed is worth it just to read the updates and comments/hilarious). After reading it, I just cocked my head and said "Really? Double Fine? Really?", but that's about it. Eh. It better be good, Tim.
Part of this project is showing what goes on behind the scenes in development, and budgetary concerns are a huge part of any development team. It will certainly make for an interesting, and honest, look into development during that portion of the documentary.
Since backers will get Steam Early Access for no additional cost, and they'll still get the promised beta even earlier, it's definitely a no harm, no foul situation.
They asked for 400,000$, got more than 3 million, and got to overexcited and overscoped things. I'm sure Double Fine is smart enough to take this into account from now on and not repeat the mistake in the future.
(And in a way its good to expose the game to more people anyway.)
I'm positively itching to try it anyway! XD
I'll admit I wish the game was done by now, but if this is what it takes to make an adventure game with the scope of the classics I love, I'm fine with it taking longer and requiring a bigger budget. This is really only an issue that we know about because of the unique insight into the production we have because of the Kickstarter and the promise of backer updates.
I think what is probably more of a reason for concern is that the early access will be Steam exclusive. I understand that there are practical reasons for it and personally I don't have a problem with it, but I do understand that this could be upsetting to some.
Your stance is commendable, but it unfortunately is based on an incorrect assumption. For comparison, Daedalic Entertainment routinely makes adventure games much with the scope of the classics at a budget of 500,000€ per game with far less manpower and far less developed industry contacts, far more detailed graphics and animation, and they now release about two or three games per year.
Tim Schafer still is my creative hero, but it is the very unfortunate truth that at the helm of Double Fine, in charge of any kind of project management, he is very obviously incapable. A 2D adventure game is about the most projectable game there is. 3.1 million $ as a starting point (Kickstarter percentage already deduced) is a gift from heaven. Eight months of planned production time (hence 387,500$ per month) was a rather tight schedule, but still doable. How could one possibly run an easy development project like this into the ground?
Yet, what do we have now? An ETA of mid July 2014 at the earliest, bringing the originally planned 8 months of development time to at least 28 and therewith the original planned costs from these three million dollars to about 11,000,000$. That's the number you haven't heard yet, but that's the money development time will burn with their calculations when they take until mid 2014 to finish with the same staff strength. If they take until 2015 even, Tim will have blown up the tiny adventure game project to 15 or even 20 million. That's not a ludicrous calculation. I've worked as a project manager for five years now and I say that's what Tim is doing because he might have developed his creative skills a lot in these last years, but was obviously never interested in realistic project planning. Which is absolutely OK for a creative genius, but absolutely disastrous for a company founder.
Selling half the game on Steam won't bring ANYTHING near the necessary 6 to 10 million dollars. What you get in return will still just be a game with halfway adequate yet certainly cost effective graphics. It won't be epic in length. You will not be able to really see where that kind of money went, because it is a badly planned project in which milestones were always missed and the design stage was never final.
You want Tim Schafer as the lead of your creative team, you really do. But without a superior slapping his fingers hard when he doesn't deliver on his milestones, I'm certain that failure is his constant companion.
Whoah, didn't even bring Steam into the equation this rant round. Ah, next time.
That said, even in the worst case scenario, the documentary guys may end up with the perfect footage for the "Lost in La Mancha" of game design. This Kickstarter wasn't all about the game, it was about the ups and downs of the process of how a game is made from scratch, and we're certainly seeing that.
Very good points about Daedalic, Vainamoinen. They certainly could have done a lot with $2.5 million.
I didn't know half of it. This from the facebook page of Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder [my translation]:
Original quote: "Ich muss leider zugeben, dass Edna Bricht Aus, Harveys Neue Augen, 1,5 Ritter, Deponia, Chaos auf Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinavs Ketten, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz und The Night of the Rabbit zusammen keine 3 Mio. Euro gekostet haben. Das sind 11 Adventures mit einer durchschnittlichen Länge von im Regelfall über 10 Stunden. Kein Titel ist Mittelmaß! Ich hab keine Ahnung was wir mit 3M machen würden. Ein Heavy Rain vielleicht. Soll ich deprimiert sein? Ich glaube nicht. Eines Tages werden wir ein Spiel für 3M machen. Bedenklich finde ich nur, dass TS 0,3M US Dollar haben wollte und nun 3M nicht ausreichen. Deponia 1-3 ist übrigens über 40 STUNDEN (!) lang und international überall konkurrenzfähig..."
Now it bothers me.
I'd love to have 3 million lol.
Did he delete this post from his facebook, or do I just suck at looking? I wanted to link it in another forum because it really is an astounding quote.
I wonder if Daedalic is looking at crowd-funding after this. I would love to see what they could do with half of BA's budget, if only to see better localization. Hearing the English songs in Deponia is painful.
I've been meaning to write a reply, but I've been really short on time lately.
Daedalic certainly deserves all kinds of praise for constantly delivering quality games. I've played and (mostly) enjoyed the Whispered World, Deponia 1 & 2 and own both Edna & Harvey games, Chains of Satinav and A New Beginning. That they are able to produce those games with such modest budgets is impressive.
I haven't seen more detailed graphics and animation in any of the Daedalic games that I've played than what little I've seen of Broken Age as a backer of DFA though. And that's certainly a huge reason why Broken Age is over budget now. Daedalic has found a place artistically where they can produce games that looks very pleasing visually with hand painted backgrounds with a great amount of details in them, but the characters are a bit flat in comparison. Background objects with movements are also fairly simple with mostly static objects that cycle through short loops of animation. I'm not an artist and don't know anything about the technical terms or what goes into producing them, but some of the things I've seen in Broken Age looks far more impressive to me as a layman. You have people spending days on making puffs of particles come out of a cloud when it's stepped on, custom creating facial expressions for one off situations and probably weeks or months on creating a realistic looking lighting setup that creates dynamic lighting on 2D rendered characters and reacts differently to different in game material textures. Sure it's insane, and I have no problem understanding that it doesn't seem fair to Carsten Fichtelmann, but I'm infinitely more excited about the visuals of this game than any Daedalic game.
As CEO of Double Fine it's ultimately his problem, but he's not project manager on this project and indeed he has let his creative visions run off with him. I don't think they've lost control though, and as long as they're able to deliver eventually I'm actually fine with this. I rather he makes the game he wants than make it on the original budget.
For Daedalic who has their tools and have perfected their production cycle a 2D game is very projectable. For Double Fine there's a lot more to this project than creating a 2D adventure. They are making on a framework they have no previous experience with and has had to create tools from scratch. There's also a lot of optimizations involved with getting the game to run smoothly on both Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. It might not be too exciting for anyone backing just for the game, but they are planning on releasing their tools publicly, which is an added bonus for anyone interested in using them to make games.
I won't deny that this project has burned a lot more money than anticipated, but your calculations are a little off. You base them on their game budget having been $3.1M after the Kickstarter and that money running out after 8 months. After Kickstarter rewards and paying 2PP their cut, what they had to work with was $2.2M and in a backer update from earlier this year they were expecting to run out of funding by July, which makes about 16 months. That makes a budget well short of $4M with continued production until July next year. And then of course there's 2PP on top of that. And with design near complete and tool chain done and integrated I think they're looking at a more predictable future scope that makes the current $6-$10M estimate more accurate.
They're not selling half the game on Steam though. What they're planning on releasing in January is a fully polished first act of the game. And if it's one thing I'm willing to bet on with this game it is that the graphics are far from "cost effective".
I know it seems like I'm disagreeing with you on a lot of stuff here, but you make good points and I don't think Tim Schafer will be remembered for his exceptional business skills. A lot of us wouldn't have it any other way though. I'm sure the business guys and marketing people at Double Fine are pulling their hair out in frustration over a lot of his decisions, but as long as they have enough of a rein on him that he's not running the company into the ground I think that letting him follow his creative vision is the best outcome. Double Fine has a lot riding on the potential success of this Kickstarter and they've built skills, tools and experience that would make any new adventure games a lot more cost efficient. Already some Amnesia Fortnight prototypes and the iOS game Middle Manager of Justice has come of their experience with MOAI. I'm very excited to see what might come next. Even more excited than I was when I heard that Telltale Games was making Sam & Max season 1.
Yeah, sorry about that. I just skimmed through that thread and got that mixed up with your post. I didn't think that you would have fabricated something like that anyway. I don't know how Facebook works, but I'm guessing the most likely explanation is that Carsten Fichtelmann indeed posted that, regretted it and then deleted it.
I'm not used to writing long posts in English and my Firefox spell checker suddenly isn't working, so let me know if there's a bunch of typos and nonsense in this post.
It's certainly true that they re-use a lot; it's certainly true that they don't make adventures "from the ground up" any more; their engine is fixed, and it took them many a year and many a game to get the darn thing running halfway properly. Also, there's the constant rumor of grinding interns and very low payment for their employees. So it's not as if there aren't grey to black patches in the way Daedalic operates. If you explain how they're so darn cost effective, you could certainly say a few unpleasing things.
It's funny, because I really wasn't. The last update showed some really interesting scenes though, so I'll reserve final judgement for later. Still... it IS a cutout/bobble head type of animation, and it IS more cost effective than hand drawn animation in any case.
I have great trouble bringing Tim's "We're fine financially" tweet in line with what is happening right now. The game has turned episodic; only 30% of funding will have come from the backers; the first half will be Steam exclusive even to backers; it will be sold on the "Early Access" channel, which is unfitting for the advertised "fully polished first half" of the game and rather tries to suggest a kind of exclusivity. These are the same measures a desperate publisher would revert to when a game's budget is exploding, including the cliffhanger. So what have we gained through Kickstarter and the coveted independence? Nothing. For the project which supposedly is the big bang of crowd funded games, that's absurdly disappointing.
I've seen this calculation elsewhere yesterday and I do agree with it mostly (although 2PP will likely earn more money through the now insanely prolonged development cycle). And I do agree that they'll very likely finish this project in a 6 to 10M budget should such funds be available to them.
I hope it, I really do. But if Schafer doesn't get this kind of money through his lord and savior Steam, we're LOOKING at a company run into the ground.
By the way, all's well concerning Tim Schafer for Doug TenNapel: Wow, just wow. The bad guys. The "anti artists". The Kickstarter Nazis so to speak. It's us or them!! Stand together for patriotism Christianity heterosexuality Kickstarterism! If you ever had doubts that this guy brings his political views into gaming, well... here we are. No, TenNapel, I won't cheer to Tim Schafer for being a bad businessman. Because there's nothing for anyone if games are too expensive and never finished. And Kickstarter "stands for" absolutely nothing any more if the dire self inflicted financial situation forces independent studios into the exact same bullshit decisions of a publisher. Tim is not dreaming the dream, he's ruining it!
Alright, that does put things in perspective... thanks for posting that! I've assumed Daedalic's games were MUCH more expensive to make than that. And this does shed a very weird light on DF.
An episodic, 30% crowd funded, Steam exclusive adventure game
BY DOUBLE FINE