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The official Double Fine thread (brought to you by J_C)

felipepepe

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Double Fine should fire people, there's no doubt about that. Especially the idiot that thought that Indie Fund was a great idea. Maybe for a micro-indie dev that needs 10k, but for fucking 400k? They spent 400k on the game and 800k paying debts, what kind of retard think that's smart?

Why the hell imbeciles like this are still afloat, but Troika had to die? :(
 

J_C

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Why the hell imbeciles like this are still afloat, but Troika had to die? :(
Maybe Troika would be alive if they would have pulled a stunt like this. :troll: Which one is better? Pulling a stunt and stay in business, delivering some good games now and then, or go out of business.
 

Western

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Codex 2012 Codex 2014 Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
I heard they had an indie fund loan of fucking 400.000 dollars for this game and paid said loan on the very first days of the Early Access but somehow they claim they don't have the resources to continue working on a fucking Dwarf Fortress clone, LOL. What will be next for Double Fail when they run out of scams? Squatting on kickstarter money?
What is difficult to believe in this? They had a strong start with EA (they said this themselves), they paid back the loan from it. Then as time went on, they had less and less income, and at this point it doesn't make enough money to cover costs.
You are failing to see their harmful business logic here. They took money from investors, sold a prototype to the consumers, payed the investors, payed their employees and then left the consumers with an unfinished product due to bad management.

In olden times a company and its investors would take responsibility for bad management and suffer the consequences, but here it was all payed by the customers. Double Fine fucked up, but the investors made money and DF payed everyone (and possibly even made a profit). Only the consumer loses.

If Double Fine gave a fuck about their consumers they would take another loan, finish the game properly and hope that the full release sales cover the debt. That is what Larian and inXile did, they didn't simply stopped development once the kickstarter money ended, they took loans to make it a better product, betting on their ability to deliver.

I think the key point is in your final sentence, would a wise man bet on Double Fines' ability to deliver? Maybe Tim has realised that with so many coals in the fire all he can do is hope to pass off AA mini games as finished products to hapless consumers who mistakenly think he still has it (the rest of us can sit around scratching our heads wondering WTF happened). We can safely add Tim to the list of once great devs who went insane as he trashes the DF brand and whatever goodwill he has left.
 

felipepepe

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Apparently, Tim Schafer's skills is inversely proportional to how much budget & freedom he has. That or he had a great right-hand man that did all the real work back then.
 
Unwanted

Goat Vomit

Andhaira
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Apparently, Tim Schafer's skills is inversely proportional to how much budget & freedom he has. That or he had a great right-hand man that did all the real work back then.
Maybe he wasn't surrounded by younger hipsters back in the day and maybe the earlier games he worked on are good at the very least as much thanks to the team as a whole as they are due to his involvement. Or maybe he was shining brighter back then because of not only what he had to work with but who he was and what he wanted to do at that point in time. Who can honestly tell?
 

Menckenstein

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Tim Schafer should kill himself and will any and all IP he holds the rights for to Activision.
 

Explorerbc

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RPS said:

And apparently some indie devs think this is bullshit

PCGamer said:
Devs react to Spacebase DF-9 release: "Early Access is not an 'alternative' development approach"

"Alpha Funded / Early Access is not an 'alternative' development approach. It has a very specific use for a very specific set of games," said Andy Hodgetts of Project Zomboid developer The Indie Stone. "So what is very clear to me, is if you can’t guarantee this from the outset then Alpha-Funding / Early Access is not for you. It’s too risky and were it just your own reputation on the line, that’d be fine. But failures tarnish the reputation of the entire model, so a failure (particularly a high-profile failure) is potentially damaging to the very developers who need this model the most."

It's interesting to see that it's these smaller devs that have the financial safety to net to keep development going even if sales drop, but it also makes sense. As Hodgetts pointed out, unlike Double Fine, they have much smaller teams that don't work out of San Francisco, where the average employee costs $10,000 per month.
 

toro

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Yeah...I think J_C must be trolling at this point, at least, this is the only rational explanation I can think of. Fuck Double Fine, those dishonest hipsters and their scams.

AT THIS POINT??? Are you fucking kidding me? I argued with him 6 months after the KS campaign was over and it was already pretty obvious at that point that this is a scam. That's like, I don't know, trolling for 1.5 years?

The guy is a plant, his posts are simply garbage and he should be banned from this thread like Roguey was from the PoE thread.
 

Outlander

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buzz

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And apparently some indie devs think this is bullshit

PCGamer said:
"Alpha Funded / Early Access is not an 'alternative' development approach. It has a very specific use for a very specific set of games," said Andy Hodgetts of Project Zomboid developer The Indie Stone. "So what is very clear to me, is if you can’t guarantee this from the outset then Alpha-Funding / Early Access is not for you. It’s too risky and were it just your own reputation on the line, that’d be fine. But failures tarnish the reputation of the entire model, so a failure (particularly a high-profile failure) is potentially damaging to the very developers who need this model the most."


Oh god look who's talking :lol:, the same faggot who is still working on his piece of shit game for 3+ years and couldn't deliver because "someone stole our laptop/dog ate our scripts/wife has died while playing the game".

Seriously, the article feels like a parody. They JUST had to get the worst possible indie teams to talk about this, the Project Zomboid hipsters and the Starbound hipsters :retarded:both of them being examples of dragged-out, shitty Early Access that scammed people out of their money. Why not get the Towns developer while you're at it?
 

BlackGoat

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The shittiest early accessers but they're not quittin (or at least maintaining some illusion), so DoubleFine's got a problem.

DF was some cutesy Pixar love-fest before their Kickstarter doc and now it seems all they do is wrong. No one even cares they just released Hack n' Slash. Don't know, is it a good game? I think a sorry would go a long way, but not long enough. Either way it's not offered, and Schafer's defensive attitude is half the problem, and this lollerzskatez notion that the game is "fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete." Yeah ok. I like the guy in spite of the guy, but DF needs to fold and reform. Maybe somewhere in the middle of the country.
 

Gragt

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Apparently, Tim Schafer's skills is inversely proportional to how much budget & freedom he has. That or he had a great right-hand man that did all the real work back then.

Schafer isn't the only one like that. Remember John Romero? The man was a talented designer and, with Carmack, the main driving force behind Doom and Quake, two games that still have very active communities to this day. I'd even argue that he had a far greater impact on video games than people credit him for, past the sphere of FPS games, for he was one of those who saw very early the importance of user-created content and the modding communities, even encouraging them to raise their standards by picking some of the best maps for commercial release. It was clear he had a certain vision of art and gameplay and wanted to take video games in a certain direction, so when he left Id to create Ion Storm, he knew what he wanted to do. Yet we know how that turned out. He proved to be a better designer than manager, even spent some of the seemingly endless funds at his disposal into frivoulous things, and couldn't handle his team(s). And even then he recognised the importance of Warren Spector's work and gave him a home and a budget to make Deus Ex—another designer who turned rather bad after achieving success.

And that's not just in video games. Movies or litterature, there are other exemples where success and the accompanying freedom and bigger budget kill talent. Wealth can be wonderful. But you know, success can test one's mettle as surely as the strongest adversary.
 

J_C

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Whatever, J-.. buzz... whatever.
Yeah, just dismiss buzz's legtimite criticism about the article. DF fucked up, but that doesn't mean that that article is not bullshit. This just shows that you don't care about objectivity, you just want to bash DF for whatever reason.
 

DeepOcean

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Seriously, the article feels like a parody. They JUST had to get the worst possible indie teams to talk about this, the Project Zomboid hipsters and the Starbound hipsters :retarded:both of them being examples of dragged-out, shitty Early Access that scammed people out of their money. Why not get the Towns developer while you're at it?
And Double Fine since Broken Age just entered on this prestigious group of developers. They maybe professional scammers and hypocrites...but hey...fucking the consumer and saying that he should be happy about it is a Double Fine specialty too. They are just envy that Double Fine is a large scale scamming factory when they didn't get nowhere close to the success.
 

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