A comment on another site, gone now, removed by overlords perhaps deeming it uncivilized or its author perhaps experiencing a change of heart. Here’s what it said:
Let me just be the first to say fuck you, Tim Schafer, you lying, sleazy ball of shit.
The man whose Double Fine Entertainment singlehandedly created the Kickstarter Phenomenon of Videogame Funding now appears to have singlehandedly redefined its playing field. Yesterday, Schafer announced that despite having raised almost ten times more than the requested $400K, their crowdfunded adventure Broken Age was over budget and behind schedule. In fact, to meet their Fall 2013 original target release, Double Fine would have to cut 75% of the game. That’s a little more than reach exceeding grasp. That’s beginning to look like development based on a lie.
Only Fair
Disclosure: I did not back Broken Age. I was hesitant about impartiality, and it was a few months before I and a group of journalists I discuss such things with agreed it would be okay with the right disclosures and professional distance. So here we go. Since November of 2012, I have given money to support the following rather esoteric collection of titles:
- Defense Grid 2 (Hidden Path) $20 – successful, $271K
- Forsaken Fortress (Photon Productions) $15 – successful, $121K
- Omega (Steve Stanley) £7 – unsuccessful, £3K of £20K
- Planet Explorers (Pathea Games) $15 – successful, $137K
- Project Eternity (Obsidian) $35 – successful, $3.9M
- Sir, You Are Being Hunted (Big Robot) £10 – successful, £92K
- Sui Generis (Bare Mettle) £10 – successful, £160K
- Torment: Tides of Numenara (inXile) $50 – successful, $4.1M
- Tug (Nerd Kingdom) $10 – successful, $293K
- Unwritten Passage (Roxlou Games) $25 – successful, $78K
- War for the Overworld (Subterrannean) £15 – successful, £211K
- Wildman (Gas Powered Games) $20 – campaign cancelled, $504K of $1.1M
That list serves as more than just an effort at disclosure; it’s a pretty good range of games and funding levels. Except under special circumstances I gave in the $10-$15 range, even for games I really want to see made, and I made an effort to avoid obviously lost causes (except Omega, but I have no idea why I backed that game) and anything that was already fully funded by the time I discovered it. Kickstarter has become kind of fun for me now, I enjoy backing certain games. It’s like “picking the ponies,” you know, selecting racehorses at a track, something I’ve never done, all esoteric names and enthusastic descriptions.
Give Us Your Money
The Kickstarter for “A Double Fine Adventure” launched on February 8, 2012. Video games had sought Kickstarter funding before, but never with big names attached, and never had a campaign been so thought out. Tim Schafer is a highly respected statesman of the industry, and his Double Fine Games is well-loved, though perennially on shaky ground. They asked for $400,000 to build a modest point and click adventure game of the Full Throttle/Grim Fandango style. If they made the target, they planned to release their game in autumn of 2013.
Within a month they got $3,336,371 from 87,142 backers, and the Kickstarter craze was born. Everybody hopped on board, and the rules were quickly learned:
- Success is most likely if you’re someone people like and trust (lesson originator: Tim Schafer and Double Fine)
- Even then, success is not guaranteed, not even if you cry in public (lesson originator: Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games)
- You need to actually have an idea, not just a name (lesson originator: Tom Hall and Brenda Braithwaite, Loot Drop)
- There really is such a thing as a silent majority, so if you’re pushing something people want – even if it wasn’t a hit before – you might do amazingly well (lesson originator: Colin McComb and inXile)
- The quality of your pitch video is more important than almost anything (lesson originator: Bare Mettle Entertainment)
- If you’re relentlessly annoying with your updates, even people who backed you will wish they hadn’t (lesson originator: Nerd Kingdom)
- Corollary to above: If you get your funding and disappear, people will become suspicious (lesson originator: Bare Mettle Entertainment)
- Don’t launch your Kickstarter campaign within two weeks of others that might get more press (lesson originator: Hidden Path).
- Funded or not, nobody likes whiny bitches and nobody likes Chris Crawford (lesson originator: Chris Crawford)
Anyway, now we learn that what had been called “a Double Fine Adventure” would be Broken Age, and the first teaser trailers looked… damn.
Then July 3, Schafer drops the bomb that despite having raised more than eight hundred percent of what they claimed they needed, Broken Age was nowhere near finished; that to hit their original target release would mean axing three quarters of the game, and that – most shockingly – they needed more money. A lot more money. So now a little bit of Broken Age will appear on Steam Early Access – a service where gamers pay for unfinished games and get updates as they happen – with the full release coming (probably) in 2015.
Wrote Tim Schafer in his note to backers:
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.
Tim Schafer has been in this business for twenty years, so one would think that other things would be in his head: the ability to work within a budget, for example; the knowledge of what a design would cost and how much time it would take. Instead, according to Schafer, his “jaw hit the floor” when they “looked into what it would take” to finish their game. Um, Tim, did you not design this game? Have you not designed games before? How could any of this come as a surprise to you, let alone a surprise of such magnitude?
“Going back to Kickstarter seemed wrong,” Schafer wrote.
You’re damn right.
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.
Okay, fair enough. That’s disappointing but acceptable. You got investment, got overzealous, and you’re going to shoulder the extra burden. That’s no different than going over-budget with a publisher, I suppose.
We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough.
Er.
And that’s when the Steam Early Access idea hit them. The chunked game will, of course, remain “free” (in the sense that they’ve already paid for it) to backers who donated the appropriate levels during the Kickstarter campaign. But now people can invest their money to buy a buggy, unfinished alpha on Steam Early Access so Double Fine can use that to further fund their title.
Other games have been doing okay on Early Access. Introversion’s Prison Architect has been on there; AJ even wrote it up recently. I’ve been curious about Folk Tale, but not enough to pay money for… well, for a buggy, unfinished alpha. Some games like Planetary Annihilation have the staggering audacity to charge insane prices – $89 in that case – for access to the alpha. Far more than the actual finished game will cost.
I have a problem with Steam Early Access. I think it’s a bad idea. The concept of people, dedicated people, paying advance money to see advance, unfinished versions of a product is okay with me. Mount & Blade did it years and years ago: $11 got you access to a game that was playable all the way through, and regular patches that added new content. Technically, though, Mount & Blade could’ve been called “done” when I bought it. Indeed, by the time they finished adding new stuff and released the game for $30-ish, I was long since through with Mount & Blade, having gotten what I could only describe as far, far more than my money’s worth. I checked out the “final” version and was so disoriented and intimidated by the immensity of new stuff I backed away and never returned. That’s not a knock on Tale Worlds’ final game, just a remark on the fact that it can be dangerous to show people things in tiny pieces.
If Double Fine’s Broken Age had been inches from done, if it had needed, say, a hundred thousand bucks or something, that would be different. That would be a tiny issue, a matter of biting off slightly more than you could chew in your excitement over getting the opportunity to make something people clearly wanted, and something that was completely yours.
But it looks like Broken Age is millions of dollars in the hole. It looks like it needs more than its total original funding, that the three million bucks it Kickstarted is not nearly enough to finish, despite being 834% of what they asked for. If you break that math down, factoring in Schafer’s remark that they’d have had to cut 75% of Broken Age if they didn’t go the Early Access route, they’re short something like twelve million dollars. So suddenly Broken Age is a $15,000,000 game. Still pretty modest by today’s standards, but we were told – backers were told – that it would cost $400,000 to make.
I mean, there’s wrong and there’s wrong. Right?
I Know What it Means. But what Does it Mean?
Tim Schafer says he got excited, in part because Broken Age did raise so much more money than he expected. He also says that games of this style have a certain size and scope in his head, and he can’t conceive of making one smaller than said scope. This creates an interesting conundrum, because it means Double Fine is guilty of one or more of the following:
- Lacking the project management discipline to conform to budget reality
- Being incompetent to manage a commercial game project regardless of scope
- Lying exuberantly about the anticipated budget for Broken Age
So which is it? Is it all of them, or just some? Is 20-year veteran Tim Schafer so incompetent that he’s unable to design a game within a budget, despite that budget being set well before design began? Or does his company lack the ability to stay within the stated parameters of a project regardless of size, so they’d be in this boat even if they’d raised $20 million on Kickstarter? Or is it just that they always knew they’d need exponentially more than they were going to make, and neglected to mention it, in effect deceiving Kickstarter backers into supporting a project by grossly understating the actual budget?
In investment circles, intentionally repaying investors with what they’ve already put in while constantly soliciting new investments to support the circular nature of the activity is referred to as a ponzi scheme, and while I wouldn’t say we’re at that point yet, the parallels are unsettling. So far backers – the only people who should really care, other than people like me who care academically – are split on whether this is a bump in the road, a bump they’re willing to ride out, or a betrayal on the part of this developer they loved.
Many are the discussions I’ve had about the “Kickstarter Phenomenon,” this still fairly new trend of game crowdfunding. I believed – I want to still believe – that it could be far more important than any of us even appreciate right now. That it could return sanity to game development, that it could restore the order in which smaller, more hungry developers create more innovative games with more modest budgets; where ther development landscape splits into the high-budget AAA and the crowdfunded Super-Indies, the $175,000,000 Bioshock Infinite popcorn blockbusters and the low-budget, occasionally clumsy but still how-the-shit-did-you-do-that Miasmatas. Both are welcome in the ecosystem of gaming because both serve important purposes: one is the expensive but stable “what the people want” production value extravaganza, the other is the risky no-publisher-would-touch-this-but-if-it-becomes-huge-man-it’ll-be-HUGE garage band effort.
For years the indies and super-indies have been suffering before the AAA. But Kickstarter (well, crowdfunding in general) offered to change that. And all this year we’ve held our breath, waiting to see what would happen. Would it be what it could, or would it fall apart?
One data point is not a trend, and Tim Schafer – much as I did used to respect him and his company – is not the only torchbearer for this effort. But as recently as last week, I said to a friend, “we’ll see first with the Double Fine game – Broken World I think it’s called, Broken… something… Broken Age – that’s probably going to be one of the first big ones out. That’s the one that might tell us what all this will mean.”
I hope I was wrong.
Do I think Tim Schafer is a lying, sleazy ball of shit, like that commenter above? No. But I’m awfully disappointed, that’s for damned sure. And I didn’t even give any money to them. Good thing, since now it seems they want more. After that they’ll probably want a little more.
Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
I AM a backer, but mostly I’m pissed off for what effect it would have on Kickstarter projects if Broken Age crashes and burns when Steam fails to generate anywhere near enough revenue to finish Act 2. Do you not realize or care how much your little project means Tim? I never would have thought Double Fine would be the one squander their backer money. Never ever.
And now we’re about to enter a world in which an Obsidian project is the one most trusted to deliver on it’s promises within budget and save/redeem Kickstarter as a funding platform. This is getting weird.
I’ve seen lots of Twitter talk on this, particularly from developers.
Some argument has been made that figuring our budgets/schedules for games is extremely difficult – there’s a corollary of this in general software development. Because everything you do, technically, has never been done before – if it had been done before, you wouldn’t be making it – it means the scale of the effort is only known once you’re deep in the trenches. Which is too late and why many projects build in a nebulous buffer.
There’s another argument that Tim Schafer was planning a $400,000 game and when the money went through the roof, he knew he had to scale up. And the bigger you scale… things get really difficult. Complexity is exponential not additive. It’s not like making a few more artworks for the game. Let me also stress AAA publishers see missed deadlines all the time – this is not abnormal with megabudgets.
So after reviewing all the chatter I am inclined to give Schafer the benefit of the doubt. I doubt he would be the kind of person to squander the cash having been through tough times in the past.
However, whether this is “understandable” or not is a completely moot point. Whilst we see Kickstarter as a funding mechanism involving investors who don’t really get any proper returns for their money, these are not “savvy investors” who know the business inside and out. On the whole, they are individuals who see a Kickstarter as a pay-what-you-want pre-order system.
That means changing of goalposts (we’re going to make a bigger game) and missing deadlines (it’s really big) and having to raise more money (no, I said it’s really big) all feed into what you see this week. A lot of people feeling they’ve been deceived or Double Fine just can’t manage their money.
At which point I want to say, well if you were a real investor you’d be able to do something about this. But this is the Kickstarter promise: all you can do is go bitch on Twitter or a blog and that’s pretty much it. You gave up your rights to give the money so freely.
This kind of thing was going to happen sooner or later because it simply beggars belief that a free money system, with no strings attached to the cash aside from reputation, was going to magically evade car crashes.
But it would be supremely ironic for the Kickstarter bubble to be punctured by the team who created it in the first place.
I don’t think Kickstarter funding will be killed by failed projects, but the funding amounts will fall (risk compensation) and some games may have more overt project management delivered upfront and monitored in public throughout the development. The only other way to “fix this” is to give the convert the backers into a real investors, which of course changes the whole Kickstarter model.
I just watched the latest update a few days back and wasn’t really surprised. His team had that thousand yard stare in their eyes for the last 6 updates, esp. the producer, who when the idea Double Fine is now implementing came up said, and I quote “We are going to piss people off.” I know that look. Inside the brain, it’s WE’RE FUCKED, WE’RE FUCKED, WE’RE FUCKED. You could see the doubt in everyone’s eyes as this game progressed and it became evident that they were trying to stuff thirty pounds into a ten pound bag.
I thought I heard at the end of the last update that they expected to release part two in April, after releasing part one in Jan. I only gave 20.00 bucks and could care less personally but then I’m not invested in the biz either and have nothing to lose. I do think Tim Schafer is cashing in on some rep points, even with his own team. I guess for me it comes down to what they release in Jan. If it’s a buggy alpha then everyone will know who to blame. Part of me thinks Schafer is sorry he ever got into this in the first place. But I’m watching from the cheap seats and long ago decided Kickstarter was going to get abused big time. Most of it is a lot of people with half baked ideas with their hands out.
It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
What I did see was what I’ve always seen in the film biz. No one is willing to step up to the big chief and lay the cards on the table. At least not in front of the cameras. I’m sort of the same mind as Harbor Master and give Schafer the benefit of the doubt. It was obvious to me months ago they would never finish the vision in Schafer’s head on time and on budget.
I read American McGee’s recent comment on the subject, and he, like many experienced developers, also seems to be siding with Double Fine and reminding audiences that this is a complex business, that it’s sometimes hard to predict things with much accuracy. I’m okay with that.
Indeed, I’d have been amazed if any of the Kickstarter games ship within a month of their stated target. The development business is just too fluid. Things change too quickly. What concerns me here isn’t that the scope of Broken Age has changed, or even that the team evidently went over budget – since as you say, the game planned at $300K isn’t the game planned at $3M – it’s the scale.
Double Fine has said, basically, that to release the game “on time” they’d have to cut it by 75%. That’s not a little out of scope, that’s not missing your window by three months or not shipping this quarter, that’s not even deciding to change engines midstream and having to eat the cost of doing so. That’s not a misapprehension about how ambitious your design is, particularly not when you’re dealing with people who’ve collectively shipped dozens of games at every budget level. You don’t get it that badly wrong by surprise, and that’s what really bothers me about the situation. Slipping from Fall of 2013 to early summer of 2014 is nothing, and the Twitter rage would be silly under those circumstances. But coming out and saying that the three million you’ve raised is nowhere near enough and never was? That the 18 months you had is not even half the amount of time you’ll need?
When Photon Productions announces Forsaken Fortress, which I think is due in October, isn’t going to arrive until February, I’ll nod sagely. The Planet Explorers people send out weekly messages saying things are taking longer than they expected due to this and that. This stuff happens, I get it. But a scale like this strikes me as malfeasance, not over-exuberance. Double Fine was the first to make waaaaay more money than expected with its Kickstarter, and now they’re saying that they don’t need a little more, they need a LOT more. So much more that they can’t even pay for it themselves.
People should have always understood that they’re assuming risk when they invest in a Kickstarter. As HM says, most see it as a pay-what-you-want pre-order, which it is not. Maybe Double Fine should be commended for reinforcing the reality of what a Kickstarter contribution is. For the longevity of the model, though, I sure wish Schafer and his team had been able to show some speck of discipline or professionalism. Instead they seem to have completely forgotten how to manage the scope of a project. If they ever knew at all.
In an earlier video they were talking about how they were overbudget by about one million and were planning a combination of cuts and looking for additional revenue sources. Several months later, they’re three million dollars overbudget. How does that happen?
I don’t buy the malfeasance angle. Shit happens. Schafer thought somehow he would capture lightening in a bottle. Didn’t happen. He took a risk and looks like he came up short.
I believe he is still acting in good faith though. Calling him incompetent seems like a stretch to me. But I always go with the dreamer over the bean counter.
I’m also not a backer on DF Adventure. They don’t really have a reputation for on-time and under-budget so when I saw they’d already met their goal I figured I’d ride this one out. I did back some of the other projects you backed! Including Obsidian, so maybe I wasn’t as concerned about that time/budget thing as I thought. But their project updates so far have been solid.
As for Prison Architect I didn’t actually get it on Steam Early Access. I got it through the Introversion web site’s early access directly. So far they’ve been great about sending updates and communicating with alpha users. But the main reason I bought from them is I knew their project seemed like my sort of thing, and I figured I could get my money’s worth from the alpha. I haven’t touched most of the recent builds, but just because updates are incremental enough that I want to get back into it after major updates are released. But I see it as like Dwarf Fortress where increasing complexity is part of the appeal.
All that aside… is it wrong that that teaser for Broken Age looks pretty fantastic, and it’s making me curious enough to consider the Early Access buy? Consider, not definite. Though I’m not real confident there are enough people like me to make what looks like an immense funding gap.
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I didn’t back this project either. Infact, I’m yet to back anything. I’ve just always been hesitant, and to be honest I’ve always struggled to think of any project that I’d feel strongly enough about to back in such a way. Thankfully, one of the maybe two or three theoretical “dream” projects that I would help self fund if I had to is coming out later this year anyway; that being a new Oddworld Inhabitants game.
I was listening to a Giant Bombcast a few weeks ago and I think it was Jeff Gertsmann who said Kickstarter needs two things to happen. It needs something to be a roaring success, and it needs something to be a spectacular failure.
Right now we still seem to be in that stage of infancy where neither has happened yet, truly anyway, but perhaps we need them to in order to set the balance and re-assign what this whole thing is about. I guess Double Fine are the closest to the failure category so far if this is anything to go by. This and the complete market irrelevance of Ouya.
Gerstmann’s right. It’s too early right now to tell what Kickstarter is going to do or mean. We should have a better idea in the next few months – by the end of the year, maybe – because that’s when the first crop of games should be coming out. And even forgetting Broken Age (which will ship eventually, and which I suspect will be very good when it does), there are some candidates in that batch with a lot of potential, from Planet Explorers to Shadowrun 2.
The ability to stay generally within budget and generally on time is going to be important. Many of these are student groups; many have little or no actual experience. Those guys are risks. Some of them, like the War for the Overworld team, run their ship like professionals already and give you lots of cause for hope. Others, like Bare Mettle – whose Sui Generis trailer generated so much attention – took the Kickstarter money and have fallen largely silent for seven months, updating two or three times. Presumably they’re working hard on the game, but you need a balance between being annoying (Nerd Kingdom) and being AWOL (Bare Mettle).
These days I treat Kickstarter like Kiva Microfinance. It makes me feel good, I never donate much, and I feel like I’m helping. Of course with Kiva the money keeps circling back to me, but with Kickstarter I might get awesome games out of it at some point.
I’m not going to focus on whether Double Fine and Tim Schafer are right or wrong here. Instead I want to comment on a big problem I’ve noticed and more and more reports are confirming over time. It’s a big problem with the phenomenon and it’s coming from the other side.
This post spreads a lot of misinformation, but I won’t hold it against it too hard because it is the same misinformation I’ve seen nearly everywhere. First off, yes HM is right when he said that the 400k (really 300k because 100k went to the documentary filmmakers) and the 3.3 million games are different. Tim Schafer said so over a year ago. The 300k game was going to be a simple point and click made mostly in Flash, but that idea got thrown out the window 8 hours into the kickstarter when they they blew past their original goal. That’s just one minor thing among many that all points back to the same issue.
No one pays attention. You brought up many learned lessons about kickstarter, but failed to include this one that is probably the most important. No one pays attention to the kickstarter. Learned from The Banner Saga. A few months ago their backers were bitching and moaning when they released a free-to-play multiplayer compoenent for their game. They said there would be a free-to-play multiplayer component on the front page of their kickstarter page and in their pitch video and in their updates. They checked their metrics and found next to no one read their kickstarter page, or even watched their video. They simply handed out their money for a copy of the game, without ever looking to see what they would get.
Every time something happens on kickstarter the first question I end up asking is, did they read the updates. And invariably they say no, or they hate updates filling their email or what updates? Everyone freaked out last year when they didn’t hit their original October 2012 (another mistake in the post) deadline, even though they told everyone that was out of date the moment they earned more than 400k. People don’t pay attention and anyone who has I don’t see complaining. They knew that they were having problems because they watch the documentary, which was one of the things the kickstarter was for. People have been getting what they invested for for months now.
I could nit pick a bunch of other errors, but I stop at this one. You’re math for how much the game would be in total is off for three reasons. One you are acting like the game costs X and it is evenly distributed. The basic math of game development is the first 90% of the game cost half and the last 10% of the game costs half. To me the removal of 75% of the content speaks more to this reality than costing $15 million. Second, you can’t really budget a game ahead of time very well because you’re wading into unknown territory. It’s one reason reusing assets or licensing an engine substantially lowers the cost of a game. But when you aren’t reusing material you could end up working on something for a month only to realize it wont work at all and throwing it all out. You don’t know how many times that will happen and if it happens enough times you are easily over budget. Some studios on some projects get very lucky and end up way under budget because everything worked the first time.
And lastly, again from the documentary and updates, this game has become a tentpole for the company and the way a company functions is that the budget of a game has to hold up the company not just the project. There were people working on The Cave that needed to be paid and the proceeds of that game would go into paying for the next project in the works. Likewise this game will end up going to fund the next one while in process. It’s why studios get closed down on the day their game releases. Not because they ran out of money on this game, but because they ran out of money for the company to continue functioning for the next one. In addition, they are just now getting paid royalties for Psychonauts sales and Brutal Legend hasn’t made them a dime yet. A lot of it is on loans and part of it paying those back for previous projects to continue functioning on the present one. And a lot of others things I can’t wrap my head around.
For all the numbers you threw around, there isn’t very much substance or substantiate to them. But it is indicative the gamer mindset for how games are made. This is an education, not a folly, of the game industry. This is how its always worked and from all accounts is the norm, not a scamming outlier.
If it at all helps think of it like this: investment is gambling. That is a statement not a point of view. You can mitigate the risk or choose propositions with more black spaces than red, but in the end it is the same as a spin of the roulette wheel. Another lesson I learned back when I played poker – the money in the pot when you bet is no longer yours. Once you bet you are that much poorer. It’s a lesson to stop people from continuing to bet a losing hand because they “invested” money into the hand. Double Fine will get Broken Age out, it is only a matter of when. It’s a pity that when it does come out it wont be remembered for its content only its making.
You make some valid points, TheGameCritique, it’s true. But you might want to read my bio before you start talking about ignorance in game development pipelines. I’ve been working professionally in the games industry for twenty years, and I know very well what goes into the development of a game. I know the ratios you quote, I’ve seen the pie charts, I’ve heard the numbers, and I say now what I said in the article and in my subsequent comments:
It’s not that they got it wrong. I’d have been amazed if they had gotten it exactly right. The business is too fluid for that. It’s that they were off by this much, when they knew the amounts they had to work with.
TheGameCritique accuses people of not knowing how games are made. Many ton’t, I do; I’m simply stating that Schafer and Double Fine should have enough experience in the process that they don’t make errors as staggering and egregious as this.
As to the lesson of not listening to the Kickstarter, and not reading updates thoroughly, I’ll grant you that – but.
BUT Double Fine are development veterans, not a noob student team. They should know from experience what $3M can get them, and they should be able to plan within a window of that amount. That they got it so far wrong indicates one of the three possibilities I mentioned in the post: they cannot conform to budget realities, they are incompetent to manage a game regardless of scope, or they were untruthful about the total sum required to make the game. If it’s #1 or #2, well, then Bobby Kotick was right about the company when he cut Brutal Legend loose. I may hate the man, but his justification was very simple:
“…I attended one meeting on Brutal Legend, and they said ‘Bobby, it’s over budget, it’s missed every milestone, and it’s not living up to the quality we were hoping for.’ We cut it loose, EA picked it up. And you you know what? It came out way over budget, it had missed every milestone, it wasn’t a very good game…”
When somebody puts me in a position where I have to agree with Bobby Kotick, I get pretty cheesed off. I expected more of Tim Schafer, and more of his team. They’ve known for almost a year how much money they had to work with. They chose not to work within those parameters – they weren’t surprised by them.
I don’t fully understand the need to revamp a game to make it much bigger with lots more puzzles and way more complexity and depth just because the Kickstarter was wildly successful and raised 800% of your projected financial target. I mean, he knows the exact game he wants to design, make that game regardless of how much extra money you get, right? If a game costs say a million to make, does it matter if kickstarter raises 2 million or 10 million? People are throwing down $20 or $30 bucks to get the ‘Tim Schafer’ experience that he explained in the kickstarter campaign. I don’t think any of these early supporters expected him to expand the game just because. I know I’m not expressing myself well, I just don’t see why he would risk ruining this project by making it 10 times as big as originally planned. Knowing how easy it is to go over budget, I would think an experienced industry developer would know to be cautious. Develop a game to make people happy and then if there is say a million left over in profits from kickstarter alone they can decide to take that and add a DLC side story with extra content and new areas to explore as a thank you to the tons of people who believed in Tim and the project.
Sort of puts Gilbert’s departure in a new light doesn’t it?
I didn’t back the project, since a Tim Schafer adventure game just wasn’t appealing enough to me, but then I still don’t think they’ve ever outdone Day of the Tentacle.
I like Gerstmann’s comment, but then he’s always seemed to me a bit more savvy than the average games journalist (“journalist” usually filling the role of “enthusiast”). Other than that I’m still not quite sure what to think of Kickstarter. FTL is a great little game, but I didn’t back it. The only game I’ve backed is Wasteland 2 (and at a modest level), and unless those guys are lying like a pro, they seem to have everything well in hand. Still, until some of those bigger projects finish, we have not much beyond good faith to sustain us.
SB, nothing has ever outdone Day of the Tentacle adventure game wise. At least not for me.
I think DF is screwed if they do and screwed if they don’t at this point. How many people would have been chanting 3 mil, 3 mil, 3 mil if they had delivered a 300,000 game? For non-backers, a lot of inside shit is talked about in the making of film. Which, ironically, might be one of the better docs made if it ever gets released. I’m Blase-man and it rivets me.
I thought about using Kickstarter for something I wanted to do once. Looked real close and slowly backed out of the room. I’ve backed one book which I got four pages into and deleted. A documentary of the Prids, one of my bestest Portland old school punk bands ever, that hasn’t had an update in 6 month. And Broken Worlds. Pike has a point if even Schafer can’t keep a handle on free money. Look at what happened when Amanda Palmer decided to move the goalposts.
Yeah, I think Scout’s right, at this point they’re not going to escape this fiasco cleanly. I’m very surprised at the things I’ve read here, I wasn’t aware of how much more there was to this story and the 75% figure is unbelievable. I can understand a lot of people’s viewpoints here but I think I side more with Steerpike because, well, you know, they’re a big developer with plenty of experience and should really know better. I’m okay with them missing the deadline or going overbudget — these things happen with games — but $3.1m, 75%, and still be out of money? That’s really something.
But it looks like Broken Age is millions of dollars in the hole. It looks like it needs more than its total original funding, that the three million bucks it Kickstarted is not nearly enough to finish, despite being 834% of what they asked for. If you break that math down, factoring in Schafer’s remark that they’d have had to cut 75% of Broken Age if they didn’t go the Early Access route, they’re short something like twelve million dollars. So suddenly Broken Age is a $15,000,000 game. Still pretty modest by today’s standards, but we were told – backers were told – that it would cost $400,000 to make.
This is a serious problem. In any industry, this is a serious problem. As an in-house attorney, if an outside counsel told me that it would cost $400,000 to try a case and we had already spent over $3 million on that case on only the first 25% of that case (whatever 25% of a case would be), I would fire their ass on the spot and possible look into a malpractice claim.
This is inexcusable. Projects run over budget all of the time in any industry. There is an acceptable amount of that. It happens. It’s impossible to predict everything and things can spiral out of control pretty quickly, but such a massive miss, especially for folks who have been in the business for as long as they have, is troubling.
Hopefully, this is just a hiccup and an isolated incident for Kickstarters. 2013-2014 (likely 2015 as well) will be a big couple of years for video game kickstarters. The first big wave – brought on by Double Fine – will either be out there for all of the world to see or still in development. If too many of these games fail or not released, it could signal the end of the fad. If they are released and good, the future could be bright.
To date, I have backed 12 games:
Massive Chalice
Jagged Alliance: Flashback
Torment: Tides of Numeria
Roam
Project Eternity
Haunts: The Manse Macabre
Dead State
Legends of Eisenwald
Shadowrun Returns
Xenonauts
The Banner Saga
Wasteland 2
I have never thrown in more than $25 (usually the lowest level pledge to get the game). So far, “Haunts: The Manse Macabre” has already failed (I pledged, and lost, $10). “Shadowrun Returns” is due out this month and looks promising. The other games are all in various stages of development. I get updates, but rarely read them. I try to back games I think I’d like. It’s a bit of a gamble, I know, but one I’m willing to make. I’ve spent lots more on games I’ve never or barely played for one reason or another.
That said, if the success rate for this slate of games ends up being poor to medicore, I will likely sit out any future Kickstarter campaigns, unless something particularly strikes me fancy. (This is likely to happen. My fancy is often struck or tickled or whatever happens to one’s fancy. I am weak when it comes to video games. Like Fox Mulder: “I want to believe.”)
Right there with you, Ajax (Ajax is the friend I was speaking to in the third to last paragraph of this very post! Indeed, the world is small… or at least mine is), regarding weakness when it comes to games. I held off on Kickstarter for a long time, but I enjoy doing it now. Gambling’s never been my thing, but if you follow the same rule of gambling – never bet more than you can lose – it’s kind of fun. I’m really looking forward to the first batch of games. In fact, I just downloaded the 0.6 Alpha of Planet Explorers!
I want to stress again, in case I failed to make it clear, it’s not that Broken Age is delayed that bothers me. It’s not that it’s over budget. This is common enough in the industry. It’s that it’s SO HUGELY over budget, that its development time was SO HUGELY underestimated, and that the first thing Double Fine did was put the unfinished game up for sale as a way to bring in MORE money, then claim that it was “only right for Double Fine to pay any overages itself.”
Another commenter noted that of course the design specs changed when they made four million dollars instead of four hundred thousand, but even so, that change was early. They made their four million dollars in the first month, the month of the Kickstarter. Three million. Anyway.
The point is despite that early scope change, the rest of development should’ve been pretty routine, aside from the camera crew lurking about. This can’t have been the surprise Tim Schafer claims it is. This is something they must have known for months, if not for the entire period of development up until now. If it did come as a total surprise to him or anyone at Double Fine, that place has serious problems.
Ajax, your $10 on Haunts is worth noting. That was a three-person startup team with a weird business model… Double Fine is a big (ish) studio with many veterans and a fairly normal, industry-tested model based on Scrum development. Yeah, the Haunts developer included industry people who knew what they were doing, but a three-person startup is inherently less stable. As yet another commenter said, Kickstarter is not a pay-what-you-want preorder system. It’s an investment and investments have risks; some more than others – student teams and three-person-weird-model-startups are more risky than a big (ish) studio with seven or eight shipped games under its belt.
The Haunts developer lost their one programmer… and they refunded backer money where possible. That would make me more sad than angry. If Hidden Path goes belly up before finishing Defense Grid 2 I’ll cry alligator tears, but going broke is different than just… just… not managing your money.
[…] This is a revised version of a comment published on the Tap-Repeatedly article "Age of Broken Promises". […]
The Haunts developer lost their one programmer… and they refunded backer money where possible. That would make me more sad than angry.
Yeah. I got that e-mail from the guy saying he would refund backer money. At that point, however, I felt so bad for him. I knew they tried their best and just couldn’t pull it off for some reasons that were beyond their control. I felt like trying to get my $10 back would be like kicking a puppy. I don’t kick puppies, so I just walked away.
What if the puppy’s really being a dick? Like the most obnoxious puppy behavior possible?
What if the puppy’s really being a dick? Like the most obnoxious puppy behavior possible?
Shockingly, I have some experience with some of the most obnoxious puppy behavior ever, having once had an obnoxious puppy (which transformed into the obnoxious dog that I’ve had for the last 7 years). In those instances, I tend use very harsh language in a very loud, commanding angry voice. It got results.
On one occassion, however, I elevated my game. I screamed, yelled (in my very loud, commanding angry voice) and threw my once very comfy, but then chewed up and destroyed slipper all over the house. This too got results. I never lost another pair of slippers again and it only took a few months for my dog to stop wincing and trying to slink away every time I took off my slippers.
All of that without a single kick.
Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of meeting my dog (see, e.g., Steerpike) would not question his obnoxiousness.
That said, if the success rate for this slate of games ends up being poor to medicore, I will likely sit out any future Kickstarter campaigns, unless something particularly strikes me fancy. (This is likely to happen. My fancy is often struck or tickled or whatever happens to one’s fancy. I am weak when it comes to video games. Like Fox Mulder: “I want to believe.”)
Welp. That took all of three days. I just backed another Kickstarter this morning. Like hot, angry bald chicks, I cannot resist the phrase “squad-level, turn-based tactics.” They are my Kryptonite.
At first I thought you were saying that hot, angry bald chicks cannot resist the phrase “squad-level, turn-based tactics.” That could be useful information.
Tank Girl?
What Schafer/Double Fine *should* have done is return proportionate shares of the money beyond what he requested to the backers. Then he could have kept to his original idea and everyone would have been happy.
It’s one thing to say that creative teams should not be hamstrung by business people. It’s another to say that business people don’t have vital roles in software development. They do; good ones can keep development teams on budget and under control.
Notwithstanding Kickstarter’s terms, a valid legal argument exists for fraud every time a development team takes money and fails to fulfill its promises. Only a matter of time until the law catches up to this funding scheme.
I don’t think the original KS goal of $400,000 is relevant. Schafer didn’t have anything to show backers when he started his KS project, that much is clear from the pitch video and the documentary: no sketches, no story, no plan. He designed the game from scratch after he got the 3 million minus expenses like documentary, T-shirts, posters, postage.
But it was also clear from one of the documentary episodes that 2.5 million would not be enough. So they raised two million extra, just for Broken Age, from the sales of Brutal Legend PC and the Double Fine Bundle alone. Next thing I know, they’re starting another KS for Massive Chalice. It’s still running when Double Fine announces their next two games will be (partly?) funded by Indie Fund. Are they eager to get rid of the Big Bad Publishers or what? And then, TWO days AFTER their second KS ended, Tim Schafer drops his bomb and now everybody knows he and his DF are not nearly as competent as we thought. Boy, am I glad I didn’t back Massive Chalice as well or I would feel doubly betrayed! Smart move to withhold that kind of damaging information. But I’m not the only backer who will never trust DF and Tim Schafer again.
Great piece. This makes me uncomfortable. I’ve only backed one project (Camelot Unchained) but surely restraint should be shown? Why allow the project to expand to what isn’t financially feasible? Just reign it in for Christ’s sake.
You’re right, Lewis. Especially when you’re Tim Schafer and you know what’s involved in making a game.
The story has a happy ending of sorts – Shadowrun Returns is great, it’s exactly what Kickstarter needed to prove itself. Plus, I think its modest scope will help educate gamers about what money really buys in development. Shadowrun made $1.8 million, and it feels like a $1.8 million game. It’s short, it hasn’t got Bioshock Infinite’s graphics, it’s missing some polish here and there. But it is definitely 100% what “should” have been made with that budget and schedule and so on.
I really want to believe in Kickstarter, in the chance it represents to rein in the insanity, and the Broken Age thing really messed up my hopes there. With Shadowrun, and (hopefully) with some other upcoming titles, that faith will be restored.
I just watched the “contrite’ follow up of Double Fine’s latest documentary update. 45 min. updates professionally filmed I might add and not some alien from a dev spewing incomprehensible whatever. If ever there was a bunch of crest-fallen devs, this was it. All the stalwart commentators and superhero bloggers won the day and Double Fine is humbled and shamed and continue to express their regret for 45 min until they decide to end with the guy doing the sound track which is cool to watch though none of the naysayers will see it. Cause they are back to playing weird RTSG or whatever it is that blows up their hemp skirts and their 010001 brains.
Personally I hope DF takes five years and tweaks every dickhead that laid down their precious 20.00 bill.
You might have noticed I have lost the loving feeling as far as games and gamers go. I won’t hurl insults. I’ll leave that to your hurling prowess.
I guess I just lost the plot somewhere along the way
I gave an improve 20 min performance the other night to a standing ovation. It fucking ruled. Real people came up to me for an hours and shook my hand. Real people in a real venue
Games? WTF?
So rip them a new one, you gatekeepers. Have at it. I’ll be in a beer soaked bar holding out on to flesh and blood hanging with smarties who know the score and not how to take tests.
Oh yeah, I still plan on playing this thing, some hell or high water.
Gosh Scout, sorry we’re all such a huge disappointment to you. I actually think you hurled insults quite well there. Standing ovation!
Ehh, I think that’s B+ insult-hurling, because I’m honestly unable to follow his point.
I’ve been watching the documentary episodes, which are freely available now (the most recent one shows the first act being released) and now I understand why it seemed everyone except backers were pissed. It’s completely endearing to watch this group of talented and passionate individuals work so hard on a project that went from being a curiosity, to a complete screw up, then on to something that clearly meant the future of the studio.
Be careful what you ask for, since you just might get it seems the appropriate lesson for Schafer and co. to take from all this. I wish them all the best.