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I don't think Broken Age taking so long is that big of a deal. The bigger issue to me is that a KS game should be mostly finished in the concept stage (even have a prototype) BEFORE it's a KS. And DF isn't doing it that way which is kind of screwed up on their part.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:56
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Spiky Ooze posted:I don't think Broken Age taking so long is that big of a deal. Double Fine's kickstarter was the first "big" one, and for them it was an opportunity to examine the viability of the adventure genre in this decade. I agree with you on principle and I typically only throw money at kickstarters that can show some groundwork already (one of the reasons I didn't back Massive Chalice) but I really wanted an adventure game. I'm disappointed in this turn of events but like with Starbound I'm not really bothered, when it comes out I'll play it to death but right now I have tons of other things to play.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:05
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Spiky Ooze posted:The bigger issue to me is that a KS game should be mostly finished in the concept stage (even have a prototype) BEFORE it's a KS. And DF isn't doing it that way which is kind of screwed up on their part. I agree with you for the most part, however part of the DF Kickstarter promise (and appeal) was that there wasn't going to be anything developed beyond "It's an adventure game" before the Kickstarter was over. This was so that the backers could see the story and concept coming together in the documentary series, and get a good idea about the full extent of the video game development process. It makes sense, even though it likely did hurt their scheduling (and any KS project not getting their own documentary definitely should have their design straightened out before hand).
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Jul 3, 2013 03:09
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Al! posted:I liked Brutal Legend a lot but it was obviously butchered because their publisher freaked out when it was turning out to take longer and be more expensive than anticipated. Good thing Double Fine's fans are more reasonable. I liked Brutal Legend but it felt like two or three games smashed into the budget and time constraints of one. An inability to properly plan for scope - or just a tendency to vastly overestimate the scope of what your team can achieve - is endemic to this industry, and it's really baffling, because it's endemic to seasoned professionals who should know better. This goes double for, uh, Double Fine because they followed Brutal Legend up with four loving phenomenal smaller downloadable games. It almost seemed like they'd learned some lessons.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:12
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Personally I think this is all fascinating, largely thanks to the documentary. We get a first hand look into how all this works and how messy it can be.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:14
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Regy Rusty posted:Personally I think this is all fascinating, largely thanks to the documentary. We get a first hand look into how all this works and how messy it can be. This post is made so much better by your avatar. But yeah the documentary alone is worth the price of admission, they make a lot of reasonable arguments during the meeting and one of them even mentions that they might be betraying the backers, so they were definitely aware of the pitfalls.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:42
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Demiurge4 posted:This post is made so much better by your avatar. Yeah, I figure they promised a documentary on either making a great game or watching it all fall apart. By the look of it we should be getting both. As long as they keep coming out with the documentary I can't really hold it against them, as bad as it ultimately sounds to be running out of this much money.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:55
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I hope their documentary crew is as good as the guys who filmed Man of La Mancha, Hearts of Darkness, or Overnight. It's the best hope for KS backers to actually get some entertainment out of it.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:58
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Wise Learned Man posted:I hope their documentary crew is as good as the guys who filmed Man of La Mancha, Hearts of Darkness, or Overnight. It's the best hope for KS backers to actually get some entertainment out of it. Have you watched any of them? As everyone has stated, the documentaries are fantastic.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:01
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The documentary has been ongoing since like the month after the Kickstarter closed. It's phenomenally well-produced and well worth whatever $15 I spent on the game.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:01
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Wise Learned Man posted:I hope their documentary crew is as good as the guys who filmed Man of La Mancha, Hearts of Darkness, or Overnight. It's the best hope for KS backers to actually get some entertainment out of it. No mention of Burden of Dreams? Shameful.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:07
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Cream_Filling posted:No mention of Burden of Dreams? Shameful. Shameful indeed, my bad. I still have an irrational fear of Klaus Kinski, even though he is dead.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:12
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epitasis posted:The documentary has been ongoing since like the month after the Kickstarter closed. It's phenomenally well-produced and well worth whatever $15 I spent on the game. Yeah. I've already gotten my money's worth. If the game actually comes out someday and is good, bonus. 
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Jul 3, 2013 04:15
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Tim's team at Double Fine can take as long as they want with Broken Age, time isn't my problem, it just seems that at this point they have an issue with how they managed the money available to them. They've been making talk recently about trying to stay away from publishers as much as possible and dealing with people, but as far as this person is concerned, if I'm going to directly give you my money, you need to show you can deliver (mostly) on time and (mostly) on budget. Broken Age reasonably expanded in time when they ended up with millions of dollars but that doesn't mean I'm going to be pleased when they went over budget two times and had to secure additional funding at the expense of their own company.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:17
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Kibayasu posted:Tim's team at Double Fine can take as long as they want with Broken Age, time isn't my problem, it just seems that at this point they have an issue with how they managed the money available to them. They've been making talk recently about trying to stay away from publishers as much as possible and dealing with people, but as far as this person is concerned, if I'm going to directly give you my money, you need to show you can deliver (mostly) on time and (mostly) on budget. Broken Age reasonably expanded in time when they ended up with millions of dollars but that doesn't mean I'm going to be pleased when they went over budget two times and had to secure additional funding at the expense of their own company. A lot of the talk about not going to a publisher seems like moving goalposts to me. Maybe I'm an awful cynic but I'm afraid that they're just seeding the idea out there so that it won't be a total scandal if they go for it 6 months from now. It would be a total bummer for me because my biggest hope about this project was that Double Fine would achieve a good platform for independence.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:22
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Somewhere out there a scorned publishing executive is laughing it up.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:23
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coffeetable posted:Somewhere out there a scorned publishing executive is laughing it up. I'm sure Bobby Kotick is feeling smug right now.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:57
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I'm not sure how anyone who has ever heard of Tim Schafer or the history of any of his game's development can be surprised by this in the least. They made it pretty clear that there was more than a little chance things would be dicey in the KS pitch too (the emphasis on the documentary watching the potential disaster.) People also acting like $3 million minus a huge amount of physical rewards (wasn't it up to a quarter of all money they made? More?) is infinite money for a game. It's absolutely peanuts in this era for even a small team, and on top of that the documentary crew are getting somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. lizzyinthesky fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 05:28
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lizzyinthesky posted:I'm not sure how anyone who has ever heard of Tim Schafer or the history of any of his game's development can be surprised by this in the least. They made it pretty clear that there was more than a little chance things would be dicey in the KS pitch too (the emphasis on the documentary watching the potential disaster.) There's a difference between "Oh wow, how'd you make that for $500 bucks," and "Wait, you went over budget, went over budget again, and went over budget again?" Especially when developing adventure games is literally your thing. I know cost projection is a challenging thing, it can be VERY fluid, so it doesn't necessarily reek of incompetence or anything, but it certainly highlights a reason publishers are so god damned controlling when they're footing the bill. For all the 'gently caress you, Trad Pubs, lolololol!!!" the Kickstart devs have been quick to bandwagon around, it provides a little more insight into what actually happens. The 'freedom from publishers' of Kickstarter for the devs can sometimes be synonymous with the 'freedom from accountability' from the KS backers, during development, at least. All this isn't to say Doublefine are bad people or developers or anything, or that they deserve bad things to happen. There's a medium between Publisher pressure and Kickstarter 'freedom' that a good, trustworthy project manager can help bridge, when it comes to product deliverables, I think. It just needs to be figured in from the beginning if people actually want to feel safer. Drifter fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 06:00
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Isn't this just an effect of this being an open decision? I bet almost every single instance of such decisions are unknown to the public because they happen only between the publisher and the developer. I saw this posted on kotaku as well and the outrage in the commentary field, compared to the reaction on the double fine forums, makes me think that the traditional way of just shutting up has an upside.
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Jul 3, 2013 06:21
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At this point I'm probably more interested in owning the documentary on DVD than I am in getting the game. Not that I'm not eager to play the game, but I just think that the documentary will just be infinitely more interesting. Hopefully the money has been set aside for that particular backer reward...
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Jul 3, 2013 06:31
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I'm the sort of vulture that will likely buy Broken Age and Massive Chalice, but only after they are finished, reviewed and massively discounted. So none of this Kickstarter drama affects myself or my fellow Steam vultures, but I am absolutely fascinated by how Double Fine proceeds as a business after this. I mean, Kickstarter is the perfect incarnation of a way to let Tim make Tim's games. But now they get a cloud of bad press and snarky word of mouth following them about the broken promise to the community and the specter of mismanagement. It may not actually be deserved since the actual impact on Broken Age is fairly benign. But when you lose the automatic trust of people that are essentially investing you, how do you fix that? Clearly DF needs to drop the physical rewards from future kickstarters, the overhead on those is silly even if they cost a penny each to press since shipping goods is a massive nuisance. The sort of person that wants to give you $300 for your game will do so without the burden of sending them a bauble. They should probably have a wider price gap between the digital game only tier, and the I-love-you-from-my-childhood tier for the people that have an emotional investment in Double Fine games. But rebuilding the trust and goodwill, that's going to be hard. Hopefully for them porting to consoles becomes trivial with the x64 architecture and they can subsist as a studio on long-tail digital sales, because they may not again have the luxury of just coming out and saying, "Hey please fund this half formed & loosely scheduled concept I came up with."
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Jul 3, 2013 07:19
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shadow puppet of a posted:
No one's going to care about what happened here in a month...or at least once the game's released. There is no long standing internet drama as long as they get a good product out the door. At worst people will say, "yeah, it was a rough patch, but man, the game's great!" And everyone will rejoice. And it's cool, they've yet to mistreat people or not deliver. You have to REALLY gently caress over things...Like Dennis Dyack levels of mismanagement, but even then, they got a bunch of money for their vaporware kickstarter. Drifter fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 07:23
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The documentary plus the side episodes have been loving fantastic and totally worth the 15 bucks I spent on this. Game development is hard and well poo poo like this ALWAYS HAPPENS even with games with publishers. DF's problem was that they just went "we want to make an adventure game!" but people are forgetting that the whole point was to make an adventure game from scratch and film the ENTIRE process of making a game, which includes coming up with the concepts and design.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:30
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GrandpaPants posted:At this point I'm probably more interested in owning the documentary on DVD than I am in getting the game. Not that I'm not eager to play the game, but I just think that the documentary will just be infinitely more interesting. Hopefully the money has been set aside for that particular backer reward... Honestly, I think other companies need to take a look at this. My 15 bucks are well justified out of how much I enjoyed the documentary. And honestly? I would probably spend 15 bucks again to watch another company struggle to make a game. And would keep paying it, the only problem being they'd have to find someone as charismatic as Schafer to star it.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:38
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Wise Learned Man posted:I hope their documentary crew is as good as the guys who filmed Man of La Mancha, Hearts of Darkness, or Overnight. It's the best hope for KS backers to actually get some entertainment out of it. This was literally the only reason I donated to this project. I don't really care about playing the game itself, just so long as they keep the documentaries rolling. But I worry they'll be the biggest item on the chopping block in later months.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:45
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Drifter posted:No one's going to care about what happened here in a month...or at least once the game's released. There is no long standing internet drama as long as they get a good product out the door. At worst people will say, "yeah, it was a rough patch, but man, the game's great!" And everyone will rejoice. And it's cool, they've yet to mistreat people or not deliver. Edit: The biggest danger is if Double Fine gives in to the temptation to dip into the Massive Chalice kickstarter funding to pay off Broken Age - which would be a huge, terrible mistake. Trapezium Dave fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 07:46
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People were promised warts and all and are now upset at seeing them warts. Kickstarter is the promised land because they are free from publishers and restrictions on release dates. They literally can release it when it is actually ready and people are disappointed it is coming out next year. What do you people want? A game on time or a game that is done? You can't always have both ways and I personally invested into this kickstarter not expecting it to be able to deliver "on time" because the worst thing I know are games that are being rushed out to meet Christmas or something. That was the entire idea, really.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:53
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^^^ - It was always assumed to not be delivered 'on time', that's not the issue, if there's any issue to be said. it's just a generated expectation and management issue if there is any. You make it sound like some entitlement gamer thing, it shouldn't be, and you're doing a disservice to try to set the argument as such.Trapezium Dave posted:
Massive Chalice doesn't have enough money to have any useful amount be taken from. A couple hundred thousand literally won't make a difference to a 6+ million game. Drifter fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 07:53
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I haven't bothered to watch a single documentary episode because I am paranoid that it will spoil some element of the game for me, but even if I never get a game or it comes out when I'm 50, I have the shirt and I'm pretty much happy with that. Also I more or less took the attitude with Kickstarter that I was throwing money at people who had cool ideas that I wanted to encourage, and a couple of months or years later I might unexpectedly get a free game but if not that's cool, which is why I'm not really bummed about backing the Ouya, for example.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:14
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Drifter posted:It was always assumed to not be delivered 'on time', that's not the issue, if there's any issue to be said. it's just a generated expectation and management issue if there is any. You make it sound like some entitlement gamer thing, it shouldn't be, and you're doing a disservice to try to set the argument as such. I suppose I misunderstood the connection, it can be difficult to understand fully in text.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:14
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Mordaedil posted:People were promised warts and all and are now upset at seeing them warts. I think people had the reasonable expectation that "warts" didn't cover going over budget, twice, on a point and click adventure game. Maybe we, I, should have. I don't really know yet. Considering the original game was planned for $300,000 I would hope that most people, after seeing the millions it got instead, would expect a looser release date. But being free from publishers doesn't mean free from financial responsibility and that is my problem here. I didn't only invest in the video game, I invested in Double Fine as a company. I looked at their past products, saw a line of high quality entertainment that I enjoyed immensely, and made the decision to invest my money. My confidence hasn't been shaken in their ability to deliver on the entertainment, just the budget. This isn't even all about Broken Age any more, at least in my mind. Now I'm thinking "Has Double Fine financially hurt themselves in an effort to make this first kickstarted game of theirs as good as it can be? If they have, what does that mean about the next one I invest in? (I didn't back Massive Chalice because I'm not interested in the genre) If they go over budget again, will they have the same resources available to them to allow them to spend the extra money on the game that they did for Broken Age?" It's almost as if publisher and professional investors have a point about controlling how people spend their money. But I should stress that this hasn't reached a "I'm mad as hell!" point. These are mostly just low rumbles that I'm feeling
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Jul 3, 2013 08:17
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I think it is important to keep in mind there's a bit of difference in "budget" and "holdings". The budget going over usually means a projection that is estimating "if things continue on this course, we might end up a bit short". Remember, they were going to make a much smaller scale game until they got all that money and they ended up scaling upwards correctly, but there are pretty costs and some you just really can't end up predicting accurately. At this point, I don't know if they are talking about the company budget or the projects budget. If it is the latter, they probably are borrowing from the company to deliver this project, but that does mean they will sell at a bit of a loss, if the former, that means rent, electricity and other expenses have changed recently to cost the company out. On the other hand, maybe the "we're over budget" is Tim making it sound more dramatic than it really is. Personally, I want to reserve my worries for when after the game is released before I start retrospectively view their business decision, as it is very difficult to really figure out what they mean when they are running along the trenches. But maybe that's because I know I can't really do anything about it and I don't really feel like being frustrated about things out of my control. YMMV.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:28
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I'm preeettty positive everyone's just talking about the game budget. Once you go past a certain point you have to dip into reserves in order to keep employment and business costs maintainable, but that doesn't mean your company dies right away. And also, of course they, like any other business, should have invested some amount from their own reserve holding; their modified engine and pipelines are a worthwhile investment in and of themselves that they'd be silly not to take advantage of - especially since they're  reviving a genre.It seemed, when they said they're trying to create the episodic function, they meant that if they hadn't they'd have to put the game on the backburner, reducing and reallocating the current workforce onto other projects, only allowing work on Broken Age once other products were bringing in money, which would then take the production time into two years from now. Their company doesn't seem to be in any danger of folding any time soon.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:45
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Chairchucker posted:I haven't bothered to watch a single documentary episode because I am paranoid that it will spoil some element of the game for me, but even if I never get a game or it comes out when I'm 50, I have the shirt and I'm pretty much happy with that. If you've seen the game trailer they released recently, you're already as spoiled as the documentary will get you. You should watch it, it's pretty great.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:21
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Wildstrike posted:Yes, that's true. I'm definitely not outraged at all. Like I said I've had more than the value of what I paid just from the videos connected to the Doublefine kickstarters. I'm also nowhere near knowledgeable enough to know how much more or less achievable Massive Chalice is for the budget. Writing isn't expensive but that's only half an adventure game, the other half is art and lots of it. DF made the choice with Broken Age to use a 2D hand-painted look with some use of flipbook animation which takes a lot more time (and money) to do than if they were using their Brutal Legend tech and animating 3D models.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:34
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The "half now, half later" release plan is a massive turn-off. With a few rare exceptions like The Walking Dead, I never return to games I've finished. It's not the same when the new-car smell is gone. The phenomenal documentary has more than made up for the backer's fee though.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:53
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Republicans posted:This was literally the only reason I donated to this project. I don't really care about playing the game itself, just so long as they keep the documentaries rolling. But I worry they'll be the biggest item on the chopping block in later months. This is pretty much where I am too. I pledged for the documentary (as I find Tim funny); I don't really have the patience for adventure games anymore. The fact that they're having problems and share those through the documentary just makes it all the more interesting to me. I get the feeling that this kind of thing is not exactly a rare occurrence in the games industry  (though usually there's a publisher with a say in things).
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Jul 3, 2013 10:05
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My only concern with this is that Double Fine might lose a lot of the goodwill they have garnered over the last year and that it will hinder them as a developer in the long run, but that might simply depend on how good Broken Age ends up being. It looks great so far. I don't feel like DF have broken any promises to me as a backer - I was promised a game and a documentary or else a trainwreck and a documentary, and that's still what I'm getting. There is a delay, but that's to be expected with game development so I'm not bothered by it. Even if the project has been mismanaged, that's not really my concern at all. Reading some of the comments on the DF forums or RPS or wherever people seem angry that they went over budget, didn't scale the project correctly, etc., but as long as they are not asking the backers for additional funds, which they are not, then I just don't see how this is at all relevant to us. It's not our problem where Tim gets the extra money from, we're still getting a game and a documentary. If the quality of the final product was affected by these budget issues then I would have felt like my money had been mismanaged by their fuckup, but they're specifically making an effort to not let the quality suffer. edit: And this outcry is probably just a result of them opening up the development process for everyone to see. Hopefully they'll be more tight-lipped with Massive Chalice regarding scope/budget issues if and when they crop up. Sway Grunt fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 11:06
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Megazver posted:If you've seen the game trailer they released recently, you're already as spoiled as the documentary will get you. You should watch it, it's pretty great. I haven't watched that I don't think. Also my internet is relatively terrible. So.
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Jul 3, 2013 12:36
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