Decline Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

It's a pre-order for all intents and purposes. Steam's early access is a pre-order a little further on. Actual "pre-orders" are the same thing toward the end. All the same, just timing is different. Super early ones can allow the project to be greenlit in the first place.

 

Not exactly because lots of people contribute far more than the value of the service their receiving.

 

If it was a charity, kickstarter would be handing out tax receipts. It is a preorder where you determine the value of the product.

 

And you risk never getting the final product at all.

 

There are things which are neither charity (which I had already said it's not, so I don't know why you're bringing it up) nor pre-ordering. That's what kickstarter is.

 

For extra goodies, nine times out of ten.

There is a legal promise, as discussed above.

 

Repeat: Broken Age is not 2D. It's 3D models and environments. Watch latest documentary episode.

 

Can't watch the documentary. Enlighten us with what the documentary says.

 

I just watched it. It's the same stuff they said earlier. First, all the art is 2D*. They use parallaxing and they use 3D skeletons to rig it, but they're not making 3D models and texturing them.

Also, it's sad to watch the creative guys talk themselves into thinking this episodic release is a good idea.

 

So he got another $150k from slacker backers? Man, even that might be a reasonable budget for an old-school style adventure game.

Maybe I just don't know any better because I live in potato-type of country, but what fucking salaries do these people get? I mean, they're supposed to be starving artist - type with money problems, wasn't really expecting them to have tens of thousands of dollars as monthly wages. With a budget of 2.4 millions dollars, they could work on the game for 2 years if monthly expenses were at something around 100 thousand dollars. The average income in Romania is 600 dollars

 

Right. So it's essentially a 2D game. Not that an adventure game gets much more complicated by just making it 3D.

 

I'd imagine employing any type of programmer would be kind of expensive in California, since you've got so many other competing companies. So, average salaries in that sector would probably be much higher than even the Californian average, which would already probably be higher because other costs there tend to be higher. The average programmer salary in California is about $90,000/year, or ~$7000 per month. Game programming, artists, etc. might be less than this, but I'm not going to worry too much, and just say it's $5000 per month per employee on average.

If they have 20 employees working on it, that's already that entire monthly budget, not including rent, taxes, utilities, etc. For 20 employees they'd probably have to be more on $3000-4000 per month. That might sound like a lot, but from what I've heard from a friend who's lived in California, living costs there tend to be higher (I'd imagine they'd be higher than Romania, especially as DF's based in a major Californian city).

 

The rule of thumb is that it costs an employer twice what the employee's salary is to employ them.

 

This is getting pathetic.

 

I'd be interested to see how much this would have cost to produce with old school graphics. The appeal of these games to me was always the writing.

 

Well according to this, the 2,5 million kickstarter money is just enough for 1,5 years. Which they will reach in a few months. So basicly the money was used for salary rent and taxes, they havent wasted it on booze and hookers. Thing is, software development costs this much for a high profile company (meaning the devs are paid well). Comparing them to a small time european developer who work for bread and water is not fair.

 

Witcher 1 budget was 5,7 mln $ (game + cinematics + marketing)

 

My god it's like there's a giant sign saying "For fucks sake don't open a business out here, it'll cost a fuck ton"

 

Yeah, but they planned out the development process, so it doesn't count

 

Because they are not mismanaging.

 

Daedelic aren't a 'small time European developer who work for bread and water'. Cost of living in Germany isn't exactly cheap, and Hamburg, being the second largest city in a first world country isn't going to be paying people with potatoes and goats milk.

The comparisons to Daedelic are entirely fair. If Broken Age was a Shaefer script, with Daedelic as the team, it would have been the game that I wanted, and I'm probably not the only one.

The sad thing is that this is painting artists as incompetent, which the vast majority aren't.

 

Yeah, sure

Then again, "small time" and "indie" were the entire point of the kickstarter craze. Publishers are evil and they're not throwing money at projects that might take too long on developers that are too expensive and can't bring a product in time and said product might even be that commercially viable in the first place.So let's go small time, use a small budget and a small team of people who don't just want big fat paychecks but to actually pursue their own passion of making video games.

Wadjet Eye Games is an american company, yet I wouldn't say that they've spent millions of dollars on Gemini Rue and the Blackwell games or everything else they did. What about the Stasis guy who's been doing a whole game by himself? I'm not saying that Schafer should have went that low but I think it was important for him to trim the fat in his development pipeline. Maybe not hire that many artists whose art were only conceptually used in the game, not the actual artwork itself?