FTL was pretty rad.

Hmm. According to a post by Tim, he doesn't seem to like people making news stories out of stuff posted on the private backer forums.

Didn't this happen with Golden Sun?

This is exactly why no publisher would touch it. Way over budget. I mean you asked for monumentally less than you got and you still came up only half way there? I completely understand why this would happen as I've seen it happen on software projects again and again, but Kickstarter backers haven't. Can't be good.

I totally understand people being upset, and it's valid to be down on Double Fine for doing this, but the argument of "They already got six times as much as they asked for" is total bullshit. The $400K goal was to make a tiny homage to adventure games of the past. No voice acting, and very little content. When they got $3M, they basically scrapped that, and making a real, complete, modern adventure game. They told that to everyone who backed it and said it was going to take much longer, but it was pretty much universal that the fans were okay with that.

Again, it's still sort of shitty of them to do this, but they aren't spending $5-7 million on a $400,000 game. They're spending $5-7 million on a $3M game. Still not great from a budgeting perspective, but they people yelling about how they're spending 15 times as much as they asked for should go back and read the statement from right after the Kickstarter ended, where they basically said they were making a completely different game with a completely different scope.

I've basically got something like 5 hours of documentary thus far so I'm happy.

Eff Kickstarter...

Or at least it continues to not be for me. I don't understand how so many people have so much money they want to give to developers to make games that may or may not ever come out and may or may not ever be good.

But that's nothing that has never been argued before. I really hoped Double Fine wouldn't have this problem.

This seems dumb

must say im kinda disappointed with this. because what happens when it comes out on streams early access and doesnt sell enough to fund the second half? then its this headache all over again

Honestly, I love double fine, but seeing this delay i don't mind, nor do i really care what the final game is. I really backed this kickstarter/broken age for the ride and documentry, and having this transparent exposure to game making. Also Tim is a funny guy :P

Yeah they fucked up. I'm not upset, I got my money's worth with the documentary, but at this point it's a clusterfuck. They should have made the game closer to the initial scope and pocketed the extra money.

I don't get why everyone is so up in arms about this, least of all backers. We're not affected at all by this. If this works, we don't have to pay another dime and the game is still going to come out. Of course there were going to be delays. It's a video game.

Personally, the documentary and this kind of candid approach to game development is exactly what I wanted out of this project, and I'm getting it.

I don't understand why people are upset, if you're a backer this changes absolutely nothing. As-a-matter-of-fact, you're getting more than what you bargained for, with early access and a better game that'll be worth far more than the messily 15usd, most, put in. For a non-backer(like myself) I get a chance to support the project and get early access(which I plan to do). Again, I fail to see the issue at hand. Unless you think games are free to make? Maybe someone can clear it up for me.

@top8cat: But we're not....we've gotten nothing so far and it's going to be over a year and a half late. Initial date was what October 2012? Also don't be naïve, they've been funded way more than $3.5 million for this game. They set up the whole "Slacker Backer" thing, they signed a deal w/ Ouya for more money. People are upset that DF, failed so hard at budgeting and scheduling. (Not to mention they didn't announce this decision until after Massive Chalice was closed), which don't think for a second wasn't planned.

I'd say it's a reasonable solution to an understandable problem.

I don't think any of us have a sense of the kinds of challenges that come from having to manage a budget that big or make a game that big, so I think it's unfair to say they should have known better. A lot of people are focusing on the original goal of $400,000 as though that's still relevant. They're not making that game anymore; they'd be crazy to. The backers expect the money they put in to be reflected in the final product, which is exactly why I can see how Double Fine might have ended up spreading themselves too thin.

As far as I can tell, it's people acting like experts because they're on the internet again.

Personally, I don't know anything about project management or budgeting for games, or designing for games, or hell, Kickstarter (I guess kinda nobody does on that one though). I do know the movie industry, and maybe that makes this seem like less money to me, I don't know - 7 million is still a low budget film in that world.

If anything, I'm surprised people are upset about this because I'm surprised they didn't see it coming. I mean, there have been a lot of backer videos. Not to mention that this was the first huge Kickstarter for videogames, and DF got way, way more support than they bargained for, and subsequently upped the ante a whole bunch. And you expected them to have a perfect plan to execute this game? It's not like they're cranking out an annual sequel, this is relatively uncharted territory. But again - what do I know? I don't know shit about videogames development, and even though I'm on the internet, I'll freely admit that this puts me in a poor position to judge Double Fine.

What I do know is that Tim is being completely transparent about this whole process, and doing his best to make an amazing game. And people are going to get some of it earlier, that's good. That's really all that matters to me.

As a software developer I completely understand how stuff like this happens. Decisions from the stakeholders on the project take too long to make which lead to missed deadlines and then eventually someone needs to tell the VP or director that the feature is gonna get delayed by six months.

That said this type of thing gets avoided by careful and meticulous project management. I think that as soon as they got 3.3 million instead of 400k they should have delayed the game to 2014 and carefully rethought the project from the ground up. Because the project was initially scoped and budgeted for 400k and then they scaled it up to a 3.3 million project, there is no way that could have gone well, and I was surprised it took them this long to delay it.

Anyway this was a $15 bet for me so I am not really mad or anything. Hopefully the game comes out, but when I put my money in I I knew it was a possibility the game would not come out. The next kickstarter from double fine is gonna be interesting.

As a developer (not of games yet, but business-related software), I totally get parceling out your content.

However, I don't have any particular praise for the second part being free.

If the "contract" we both agreed to stipulates that for my $15/20 I bought the game, then I've bought the whole, complete game, whenever it's released. By parceling out your content and/or having an Early Access (or Preview) version that you can pay to opt-in on, you have - in every discernible way - turned your game from a simple product into a service. This means that you can get away with a less complete content-/feature-set in the initial version, but that you don't get to re-charge people money when you finish the work.

It's very gratifying to see this sort of thing (which is a lot more visible in business software) happen in a medium that has had a lot of problems with over-charging and under-delivering on a product in the last 5-7 years.

I think it's kinda weird, but at least the 2nd half is going to be rolled out for free (because of course it should be free), but it still sits kind of weird with me. Double Fine's whole kickstarter thing sits weird with me honestly. I like the way Super Giant Games are doing things, and obviously they are a much smaller team with a smaller game, but still.

I'm on both sides. This is an understandable solution, but also really dumb that it came to this. Budget your game correctly.

It's funny that Patrick's claim is that this info "leaked out" when he's probably a backer. Is it a leaked source when you're the source?

This statement wasn't meant to be made public, so it wasn't planned to come out at all.

I think at the end of the day, kickstarter will fail because the layman really won't be able to understand these unique pitfalls of game costs and development. It's not like they are throwing 3.5mill at a magic game making programming and letting it ride, they are using the money mostly to pay salaries of the people they have working on the game. So if there are delays in development for whatever reason, that money will run out before the project gets completed so they have to acquire additional funds. This is why publishers won't back titles like this because they won't see enough return for their investment. However, kickstarter investors only return will be the game itself, so they naturally won't understand the whole "well development is taking longer than expected, we need more money" since they aren't even getting capital.

I wonder if double fine will be that great tragedy that ryan was talking about in one of the bombcasts

Come on, Double Fine! Budget and plan ahead of time. Stick to a schedule. Don't ask for people to have faith in your ability to deliver a product if your schedule has even the slightest chance of being too short.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. They need more money to make the game they want to make and have a way to do it without asking backers for more money. I would hazard a guess that games in development often require additional funding part way through, it's just not something the general public ever hears about.

I think he's speaking as if he's a backer, so the information was meant for him. Although, if backers really want to complain about all this, they're on the wrong forum. They can talk directly to the developers and to other backers. You know. On the backer forum.

Well given that it's Tim Schafer (and that I didn't donate) I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure whatever they put will be good quality and I'll probably buy it. Given the situation Double Fine has placed themselves in, this seems like a reasonable solution.

But It's hard to feel good about this. I just don't understand why developers seem to continually believe that somehow they don't have to follow good business practices that every other industry is judged by.

Who doesn't want to make a huge awesome game? Or great awesome products? But there is such a thing as budgeting,which is critically important when you are spending other people's money. And well if you only have three million dollars for a game, then a three million dollar game is what you can make unless you can source some more. Sure Cost over-runs happen, especially in creative endeavors, but think how insanely far over budget they must be to have to do this.

This change just feels fairly irresponsible and a violation of trust Double Fine has with their pledges. I know they don't mean it that way, but what else can you call it? You tell people you need 4oo k, they give you nearly 7 times that amount and then you tell them after you have their money that's still not close to being enough?

If this is an example of how even well respected developers handle kickstarter promises, kickstarter as a viable funding mechanism will be non functional in pretty short time.

The industry badly badly needs a wakeup about how to treat gamers. Too many of them seem to think gamers will just put up with whatever they do. That may be somewhat true-ish now, but eventually video games will likely have significant competition from other newer entertainment sources. And when they do they may discover how little loyalty they really have from their diehards once they a better option.

All the kind words in the world do not fix continued broken promises. I fear the consumer reaction to the Xbox One nonsense may be the just beginning of an epic backlash.

I feel a little uncomfortable about this, but then, if ultimately I'm getting the entire game at some point for that money that I spent on the Kickstarter, and it's of a much grander scope than I was originally sold on...well, that's not such a bad thing.

Tim says in the very note you should have read, that he seems incapable of making a smaller game, he keeps wanting to make an adventure game a specific size and can't imagine one smaller than the ones he's made before. It's a case of wanting to make your baby whole, and seeing it could maybe be close to possible and not being able to make anything less than a whole baby :) This 'issue' is specific to Tim in this case, the industry has issues... but most other devs would have just shipped the game as-is or cut chunks or done any of the options Tim talked about because the pressure of a publisher pulling the funding because of this kinda thing would have forced those options to have been taken. :(

@slag: It's been said before, but after they got 3 million from the Kickstarter, they completely revamped the scope of the game. This story is just about the increase from that amount to meet the new goals. All of which has been made very transparent to the backers of the game.

I've said before in this thread that I'm pretty ignorant of the nitty-gritty details of game development, but I do know film. And if you're asking videogames to stick with the best practices of other industries, well, movies have to look for more money to finish ALL THE TIME. Practically every film ever made runs into budgetary snags of some sort, and either the scale has to be reduced, or funding increased.

These are the two choices: more game more money, or no more money, less game. I, for one, am glad they chose the former, even if it's not necessarily going to look great for them in the short run.

I just think it's kinda funny how many media outlets have been wary of covering Kickstarter, but that Double Fine always were held up as some kind of exception to how bad things could get, despite both of their kickstarters having been for games that at the point of the campaigns launching not even being in prototype states yet, and which it seems were severely underbudgeted, even while blowing past their (way too low?) goals, while there have been plenty of kickstarter campaigns for games with actual working prototype or alpha builds that couldn't get any coverage by the media.

this is a reasonable decision , but the outcry is reasonable too

I think what happened was that after they got the crazy amount they received, they must have revised their whole budget plan and added ambition. That being said, you can only plan for so much and so long and there's almost no long term plan that goes without snags and hitches in the road. At the very least, Tim Schafer is being quite open and acknowledging these snags and hitches.

That being said, I don't think you're wrong to be disappointed, though.

Seriously Patrick? Why couldn't you have just waited a couple more hours to blow your load and see the shitstorm that was about to ensue with all game news sites taking out a sword and falling on it. You could have just browsed the backer forums a little bit more before you decided to splooge that article all over the internet.

GIANTBOMB IS BETTER THAN THIS! You should have been an example and stood above all the other misleading jerks, but you fell right into the trap!

Nobody who has followed Tim's history should be surprised that a game he made went overbudget and over scope.

People should be even less surprised if they backed the project, since the (excellent) documentary videos have mentioned budgeting problems repeateadly.

I wonder how much untapped revenue is out there for an adventure game when so many people kicked in and will get the first installment for free.

@homelessbird: I totally get that is the way the industry typically works. That does not excuse it at all in this instance.

Changing these kinds of details after you have somebody else's money is not transparency it should be noted. Transparency would have been alerting potential backers loudly this possibility explicitly at pitch time pre-donation. They are doing the right thing by telling the truth about they feel they have to do, but they are hardly being transparent about it.

Last I looked until kickstarter, films and games didn't get crowd funding directly from their fans, so the onus is on the people asking for the money to understand why those people donated and what they were expecting in return.

You can't just go business as normal when you are doing something like kickstarter. Not if you ever want to use it again. You want to do business as normal than get your funding from a normal source that understands the quirks of your industry. To expect fans to "get this" is crazily unrealistic. They aren't publishers or accountants, they're your fans and probably your best customers.

No one forced them to use kickstarter as a funding source, they voluntarily decided to use it. Nor did their donors ask them to increase scope of their project. Double Fine decided to do that after the fact.

Both probably good decisions, but it doesn't mean they didn't drop the ball in communicating these kinds of risks or possibilities when they should have (i.e. before soliciting monies).

If devs like Double Fine want to continue to have things like Kickstarter as a meaningful funding source than they need to respect how it works. Which is entirely upon good faith..Otherwise crowdfunders like kickstarter will fizzle out because not enough donors will trust it.

There is a very good reason the Securities and Exchange Commission does not generally like things like crowd funding and that's because unsophisticated investors tend to get really ripped off. I don't think people will get ripped off in this instance, but I can't blame them for being upset. They were promised something and Double Fine arguably did not live up to their promises. Perhaps for good reasons, but broken promises are broken promises.

I don't have a dog in this race. I didn't donate. But I'd like to see Double Fine and firms like them succeed for the sake of genre and budget size diversity in games. And they seem like honestly good people. Seeing practices like this, make me think they might not :(

There's the need to someone to do a bit of pressure to the games go well.
But at the same time those pressurers can't just go and ruin the game to fit into some "target demographic standard".

On the snes era was like that and worked well, but today you either get a lot of lazy fucks never finishing it or a completely ruined by publishers game.

@oursin_360: I'm in no way accusing them of "wasting" the money, I'm sure it's all been spent on the game, an intelligently. What's "frustrating" is they asked for a $400k gift and received $3.5million. Had they kept to the original scope or only slightly increased it, that money alone would have been more than enough. Basically everyone is upset that Double Fine got greedy, gambled (in the sense that this would become a megahit and set the company for years) with our funds, and aren't even halfway done after burning through probably $4-$5 million?

I'm a backer, and no I'm not actually angry, but I do view this as a black mark against the Kickstarter model.

@slag: I can't blame anyone for being upset either, but if they were backers, and closely following the documentary and updates, then they were already aware of this situation and are just using the news story as a chance to express it.

This didn't come out of nowhere - that's what I was trying to convey in my other post. It's been posted earlier in this thread, but here's an excerpt from the original pitch: "What's going to happen? No one can say for sure. But here's my promise to you: Either the game will be great, or it will be a spectacular failure, caught on camera for everyone to see. Either way, you win. What could go wrong?"

This entire process has been about as heavily visible to the public as any other game development process has been, ever. There's (I think) about ten hours of documentary? Maybe that's an exaggeration, but there's a lot. They've been very clear from the beginning that this was an experiment, and they were inviting people along for the ride.

I totally understand being disenfranchised with the industry in general. I also understand being very wary of Kickstarter. I just think your characterization of Double Fine as employing "business as usual" here is not accurate, and I don't think anyone who backed the game was misled, either intentionally or unintentionally. They've been as above board as it gets.

As far as your complaints about them actually looking for the money? I don't know, maybe you're right that that's inappropriate after having public backing, I don't know. I'm not so sure though. Kickstarter isn't an investment site, it's very clear that you're making donations. There is a bond of trust there to deliver the product, to be sure, and I think Double Fine is trying to deliver that as best they can. They're funneling as much money of their own into this project as well.

On one hand I like Tim and Double Fine. On the other I'm not exactly shocked by this development and it furthers my belief in paying for a product and not a promise in the future. I mean there's a reason why Brutal Legend was such a flop and all the other things coming out of them. It just bugs me though that they're acting like it's all super when in reality they had about 8x their original projections and they're still hitting snags in budgeting.

I'm sorry, but hire a fucking accountant if you don't know how to work the books properly. Money doesn't just get up and disappear. Either he hired far to much staff or he bought a yacht. Obviously I'm leaning towards the former, and in that case it's complete mismanagement. You're making a small traditional adventure game, not The Witcher 2.

@slag: If something scummy was happening here, your argument might be relevant, but absolutely no one is getting hurt by this news. If anything, backers only stand to gain from this, because it means the game's going to end up bigger and better.

And part of it will be done earlier.

This bugs me, but I'm not entirely sure I can explain why. This seems like gross mismanagement, which is weird considering how much more money they got than was asked for. I don't really understand the idea of "oh this happens to game development all the time" because this is not a normal game development process, and to think otherwise seems ignorant.

I only backed this for the documentary by Two Player Productions and this development will only enrich that piece so I'm still satisfied with where my money went.

I wasn't a backer but I am interested in the projects success. When I see it on steam maybe I'll grab it.

The kickstarter backers are very divided on this, from what I've seen.

I find it interesting that many a ready to lump all kickstarter projects under a single banner of "poor planning," when we already have kickstarter success stories like FTL & Shadowrun Returns. (Even if that last one has yet to be released, it's coming soon with tentative praise.)

I'm personally not happy with how DF has handled this project, but I have enjoyed the video documentary series immensely, and I invested in a project that I knew was not guaranteed, not treated it like a pre-order like many have. I even still invested in the Massive Chalice game, though I have no idea how they will produce a game with the meager funds they have received.

Investments are risky, and may not always pan out like you wish. I'm not excited about this turn of events, but at least they are open about it.

@jasondesante: I'm a little confused by your comment. What did Patrick do wrong? Is there more to this story? Not trying to be hostile, I just want some clarification.

I really don't care about that game, I backed, and I regret it, but funny enough I didn't back a game in two parts. Amazing outcome of an amazing Kikstarter campaign. I'm not backing any software anymore, learned my lesson (thank you Double Fine for showing me the light, that publishers might not be always wrong).