Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[J_C]

Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder (translation from TT forum, original source deleted?):

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna's Breakout, Harvey's New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav's Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we'd do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it's alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

None of these titles is just average!

Hahahah, that is what those games are exactly. Daedalic makes average adventure games AT BEST! All they have is good graphics.

I also have a hard time believing that they can make 11 long adventure games with good graphics from less then 3 million. Maybe they pay bread and water to their employees. Also reusing engines and art assest must save them a lot.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Daedalic makes average adventure games AT BEST!

That while praising the casual crap by DF. Fanboys gonna fanboy. Or rather JC gonna popamole.

 

[J_C]

Daedalic makes average adventure games AT BEST!

That while praising the casual crap by DF. Fanboys gonna fanboy. Or rather JC gonna popamole.

Wake me up when Daedalic makes a Psychonauts level game.

 

[MRY]

I haven't followed this closely enough, but I think there's a really large gap between the salaries that a developer like Daedelic pays, and the salaries that Double Fine pays. Developing games within the United States is really expensive. Developing anything within the United States is really expensive. I'm not saying this fully explains the difference, but I do think it bears on it.

Now, a legitimate response is, "If it costs so much to hire Americans to do your art, then hire Czechs or Koreans or Indians or whatever." But I think one could argue that it is completely consistent with the Kickstarter ethos to not try to minimize costs by off-shoring your labor, but to instead pay "honest wages" to your local workforce. And to give them nice benefits, etc. That's part of what I was driving at in the prior post. Part of "not doing things the traditional publisher way" could be construed as not trying to minimize expenses by driving labor costs as low as possible.

It really just depends on what you think Kickstarter is about. If you think it's primarily about delivering a product -- the very best version of the product that was advertised -- then I think it is beyond dispute that Double Fine is misbehaving. But if you think it's primarily bout funding a project -- which is to say, paying for both a certain kind of process and a certain kind of end product -- then it's a debatable point, one that can only be resolved by seeing how the game comes out. At the end of the day, if Broken Age is really great, and doesn't take another two years or something to come out, I don't think there's much room left to get angry at Double Fine or Schafer. On the other hand, if it's a game that plainly was rushed at the end and cut short, or if it's just lousy, then I think it's fair to say that they put too much into the process and not enough into the product.

Incidentally, I think you have to kind of go project-by-project on KS to say what weight should go to process, and what weight to product. For example, on that project where some nine-year-old girl wanted to make an RPG to shut up her sexist brothers*, and it got than 30 times its original goal ($25k or something), I'm pretty sure the end product doesn't matter much. The end project, we should expect, will be lousy because nine year olds don't make great RPGs, no matter the budget they have. Even if the game never gets finished, I don't think there's much cause to complain -- paying for the project was itself a statement. By contrast, those miniatures that managed to raise like $2.5M (again, something like 30 times the asking price) really are all about the product. Whether they're hand crafted by the last living Shaker disciples or made in a Sri Lankan sweatshop, people really were just paying for a bunch of cool little toys. If the toys are terrible, or just never get made, then it would be a fiasco.

(* I realize there's a question whether the whole thing was a weird piece of performance art / public neurotic display by the mom.)

DFA is somewhere in the middle of that, but I got a strong vibe that they were selling the process as well as the product.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Wake me up when Daedalic makes a Psychonauts level game.

Well, I'm not sure how you can sleep with Schafer dick so far up your throat, but hey. You probably still hope that Broken Age will be better than the worst from Daedalic. I wonder if you'll wake up yourself when the game will be released. Probably not. Hipster popamolers love their "quirky" games.

Oh and nice switching it around now after you were telling everybody how ALL games by DF are awesome.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Haha, I wasn't aware of Kotick's comment on Brutal Legend. This whole BA fiasco really makes you see publishers in a different light, doesn't it?

Umm, no? It seems you haven't seen the miriads of potentionally good games ruined by the riskfree, profit oriented publishers. And if you suck up to publishers just because an indie game has problems, you are stupid.

Yes, I suck up to publishers because I find it funny that Bobby Kotick, of all people, called out Schafer on his awful project management skills, and was 100% right as this whole situation proves. On the other hand, if you really believe this is an "indie game", then it is you who are stupid, so painfully stupid. Next thing you know, Far Cry Blood Dragon and Divinity: Original Sin are also indie.

In any case, in the NeoGAF thread about this, there was a dude who commented "Now we all know how it feels to publish a Tim Schafer game.". Like it or not, there are studios who clearly do need publisher pressure in order to get anything done at all. Double Fine sits firmly in this category, and apparently Silicon Knights did as well before their untimely demise.

 

[evdk]

Carsten Fichtelmann, Daedalic founder (translation from TT forum, original source deleted?):

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna's Breakout, Harvey's New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav's Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we'd do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it's alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

Well, thank the gods that they never had the budget.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

 

[Western]

Tim should be raising money for a decent project manager, there's no way Double Fine is going to be viable long term otherwise. It's fairly obvious the man is terrible at project management and likely terrible with money in general.

 

[DalekFlay]

I haven't followed this closely enough, but I think there's a really large gap between the salaries that a developer like Daedelic pays, and the salaries that Double Fine pays. Developing games within the United States is really expensive. Developing anything within the United States is really expensive. I'm not saying this fully explains the difference, but I do think it bears on it.

It's not just America it's San Francisco, in California, which is pretty much the most expensive place in which to operate a business in the United States.

 

[DalekFlay]

Hahahah, that is what those games are exactly. Daedalic makes average adventure games AT BEST! All they have is good graphics.

Well the only thing else that really matters in a point and click is Schafer's puzzle design and dialog, so unless he pays himself three million dollars...

 

[Aeschylus]

You probably still hope that Broken Age will be better than the worst from Daedalic. I wonder if you'll wake up yourself when the game will be released. Probably not. Hipster popamolers love their "quirky" games.

Daedalic has made one genuinely good game (Chaos on Deponia) and a bunch of slightly-above-average to mediocre stuff with decent visuals. To paraphrase Larry Holmes, they could not carry Schaefer's jockstrap in terms of quality output. To be honest, it sort of baffles me how they could have made all those games for <3m Euros when King's Quest 6's budget (in 1990) was over $1m. But I guess they have some crazy German voodoo that makes it possible.

 

[tuluse]

It doesn't really hurt his point, but 3 million euros is almost double what the actual (initial) budget was for Broken Age. 2.2 million dollars is about 1.7 million euros. So you could *only* make 5-6 Deadalic games.

 

[MRY]

To be honest, it sort of baffles me how they could have made all those games for <3m Euros when King's Quest 6's budget (in 1990) was over $1m. But I guess they have some crazy German voodoo that makes it possible.

I'm pretty sure that art costs have dropped dramatically since then.

I remember back in the late 90s when this guy named Jeff Hangartner was running a site called Pixelation. Basically, over the span of a couple years, you could watch a bunch of amateurs (mostly teenage kids) reach the point where their pixel art was superior to what professionals were able to put out on the NES in the 1980s. I'm not saying "higher resolution and more colors" -- I'm saying, when they restricted themselves to NES-level options, the output was better. Heck, if you look at Mythri and Infinity (a game I worked on), two Game Boy Color games, both were made with zero budget by amateurs and both compare pretty well with late-end NES games like Dragon Warrior IV or the Japanese Final Fantasy 3, despite those games having much larger teams of professionals. Tools and technique both got more refined, making it easier to do good pixel art.

I assume something similar went on with the costs of making KQVI.

--EDIT--
For a maybe more apt comparison, you can look at the nicer-looking AGS adventures and compare them to games from the early 90s.

 

[J1M]

Is this game incomplete, over budget, and full of really crappy art that looks like a lady drew South Park... or has something changed?

 

[HanoverF]

So a guy who donated a buck is pissed the game he wasn't going to get anyway is delayed?


or if : x he is glorious freedom fighter!

 

[evdk]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

It is a donation, investment would give you certain rights, which KS does not give you. You are sending them money, no strings attached (at least until there's a civil suit to set some precedents). That of course does not mean that you can't or shouldn't complain, on the contrary - KS is basd mostly on reputation and warning possible future backers of a undeserving company/individual is a valid tactic. You would discourage your friends from giving money to someone who's been known to use the funds to buy drugs, wouldn't you?

 

[J_C]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

Truth hurts, doesnt it?You are right that you can complain, but KS is not an investment, but a donation,in the hope that you will get something in return.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

Truth hurts, doesnt it?You are right that you can complain, but KS is not an investment, but a donation,in the hope that you will get something in return.

As far as I remember every kickstarter is 'promising' something, which sounds like an investment to me.

 

[Brotherman Bill]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

Truth hurts, doesnt it?You are right that you can complain, but KS is not an investment, but a donation,in the hope that you will get something in return.

yea, but that doesn't mean you should just smile while taking it up the ass, or that it's not OK to rage at Tim for being an incompetent.

 

[J_C]

Haha, I wasn't aware of Kotick's comment on Brutal Legend. This whole BA fiasco really makes you see publishers in a different light, doesn't it?

Umm, no? It seems you haven't seen the miriads of potentionally good games ruined by the riskfree, profit oriented publishers. And if you suck up to publishers just because an indie game has problems, you are stupid.

Yes, I suck up to publishers because I find it funny that Bobby Kotick, of all people, called out Schafer on his awful project management skills, and was 100% right as this whole situation proves. On the other hand, if you really believe this is an "indie game", then it is you who are stupid, so painfully stupid. Next thing you know, Far Cry Blood Dragon and Divinity: Original Sin are also indie.

In any case, in the NeoGAF thread about this, there was a dude who commented "Now we all know how it feels to publish a Tim Schafer game.". Like it or not, there are studios who clearly do need publisher pressure in order to get anything done at all. Double Fine sits firmly in this category, and apparently Silicon Knights did as well before their untimely demise.

Yes Divinitys is an indie game. Indie doesnt mean a studio with 2 guys. It means independent, and Larian is an independent studio. You are narrow minded if you only recognise the 2 man studios as indies.

 

[J_C]

Christ, just read a 500-comment reddit thread where virtually everyone agreed that Kickstarter was not an investment, it was a donation where you may or may not get your moneys worth so all the whiners are all haters who didnt understand what they donated to anyways and should stop complaining, only nabbs doesn't understand that software projects always go over budget anyways and


Man I'm glad I have the codex

Truth hurts, doesnt it?You are right that you can complain, but KS is not an investment, but a donation,in the hope that you will get something in return.

yea, but that doesn't mean you should just smile while taking it up the ass, or that it's not OK to rage at Tim for being an incompetent.

We agree in that.

 

[ghostdog]

KS isn't exactly a donation. It's something between a donation and a pre-order. More like a pre-order actually.

Is a creator legally obligated to fulfill the promises of their project?

Yes. Kickstarter's Terms of Use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill. (This is what creators see before they launch.) We crafted these terms to create a legal requirement for creators to follow through on their projects, and to give backers a recourse if they don't. We hope that backers will consider using this provision only in cases where they feel that a creator has not made a good faith effort to complete the project and fulfill.

Obviously you won't get your money back if the product is crappy, but the same applies for pre-orders.

 

[tuluse]

It is a donation, investment would give you certain rights, which KS does not give you. You are sending them money, no strings attached (at least until there's a civil suit to set some precedents). That of course does not mean that you can't or shouldn't complain, on the contrary - KS is basd mostly on reputation and warning possible future backers of a undeserving company/individual is a valid tactic. You would discourage your friends from giving money to someone who's been known to use the funds to buy drugs, wouldn't you?

It's a contribution or a pledge. A donation is something you do out of charity and you don't expect anything in return.

 

[DalekFlay]

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.