Double Fine decides to break some records (and also make a new point and click)

[Margalis]

I don't know, I'm not a big fan of an established corporation using Kickstarter and profiting from name recognition. Seems almost opposite in spirit to what Kickstarter is for.

I'd much rather them ask for money on a website they set up and leave Kickstarter as a place focused on discovery and funding new people with fresh ideas. I could see this starting a trend where Kickstarter completely ceases to be about unknowns convincing you they need money for a cool idea and could do great things with it and turning into a site where companies with some name recognition but low fortunes try to bolster revenue.

[tmp]

I could see this starting a trend where Kickstarter completely ceases to be about unknowns convincing you they need money for a cool idea and could do great things with it and turning into a site where companies with some name recognition but low fortunes try to bolster revenue.

So, exactly at which point would you draw the line of "no, you are too recognizable, gtfo"? (the line which Kickstarter itself doesn't draw anywhere)

Should Rich Burlew for example also spend his time re-coding the Kickstarter functionality making his own web page to beg for money, because his presence on Kickstarter clearly siphons too much from less established people, as apparently believed by some in this thread? Or does he get a pass because he's not a "company"? If it's the latter, would it be okay for Ron Gilbert to personally ask for money on his new adventure game, rather than do it as part of Double Fine? Or is he too famous even then? If it's the former (or if the answer to last question is yes) ... again, where do you draw the line?

[K9]

This is like arguing that celebrities shouldn't be on twitter because they are sucking up all the followers.

[Ghambit]

This is like arguing that celebrities shouldn't be on twitter because they are sucking up all the followers.

Umm no, it's not.

[JWIV]

This is like arguing that celebrities shouldn't be on twitter because they are sucking up all the followers.

Pretty much this.  This entire argument is ass stupid.   Should established established boardgame designers be banned?  How about semi-famous cash poor kid bands?  Or a local professionally run newsblog looking to expand its coverage and needing non traditional funding?  Seriously, is the entire argument that if you're not living in a basement on ramen, you don't get to crowd-fund? 

Kickstarter is a level playing field - double fine's little icon doesn't take up any more space than any other icon on the video game project page.  It sits right next to some indie project or 14 yr old trying to pass off his game design as the biggest thing since M:TG.  And as a lot of people have already stated, this is most likely bringing a lot of people to Kickstarter that otherwise never would have signed up.  It's probable that some small percentage will continue to poke their head around, discover additional projects, and fund those as well.

[sickrubik]

It's not worth it for most larger companies who would fund stuff on their own to do this, and even then, so what. If the product is something people are interested in, and it gets funded, awesome. There is plenty of evidence with the explosive growth of Kickstarter and Indiegogo is not stifling smaller ventures, and in fact seems to be benefiting them. Again, there are a crazy amount of well-over 100% funded things on KS, including a webcomic generating over 500k!

Larger companies want complete control of the item and sell the final packaged good to you. There are so many corporate interests when it comes to them, it's not worth their time or hassle.

This really stinks of "I liked them better when they were underground."

[murdoc]

This really stinks of "I liked them better when they were underground."

Very much so.

I didn't go to Kickstarter because I had some money burning a hole in my pocket and felt like playing a point and click adventure game, I went because I want a Tim Schaeffer/Ron Gilbert adventure game and am really interested in the documentary behind it all. It's not like some other homegrown adventure game is missing out on my cash.

[JWIV]

Honestly, to bring this back on point  a bit, I'm wondering if Double Fine is going to fall into the trap of having too much budget for the game.  At 300K, they were going to have to focus on making a very tight focused product,  multiplying the the amount of money to play with by at least 400%, you have to be concerned that they may end up with more than a little feature bloat.

[sickrubik]

That particular thing I have wondered about. With 32 days to go, we are already at $1M over their deadline. We could be looking at a ridiculous amount of money at the end of the 32 days. The thing that would be interesting to see if this starts a series of games, or a section of Double Fine purely for point-and-clicks.... or maybe they'll just buy Tell Tale.

[Yegolev]

This sums it up a bit better for me.

The second question is more important. While an established company like Double Fine understandably sees fans immediately flocking to donate, things become much more difficult for an emerging artist working on his or her first project. While you could argue that it is the responsibility of that artist to earn his or her reputation over time, I can’t help but wonder what kinds of tools Kickstarter could introduce to facilitate discovery and fundraising for less visible names. This will become increasingly important as more established names and studios see the success of the platform and begin migrating to it. So, I suppose, my second question is this:

How can Kickstarter ensure that it remains a platform for the best ideas and projects, not merely the biggest names?

I can sum that up even better:

WAAAH ENTITLEMENT WAAAH

I'm also flagging that crap as trolling.

[tmp]

Moar established devs possibly coming to shut up and take all the money...

Chris Avellone asks people for suggestions what game would they like to potentially get kickstarted

(the volume of responses made the obsidian forums keel over. Might take a while to get them working again)

[koro]

That particular thing I have wondered about. With 32 days to go, we are already at $1M over their deadline. We could be looking at a ridiculous amount of money at the end of the 32 days. The thing that would be interesting to see if this starts a series of games, or a section of Double Fine purely for point-and-clicks.... or maybe they'll just buy Tell Tale.

Ron Gilbert actually gave some figures of what he expected the budget for a modern 2D adventure game would be back in 2004. I'm not certain how accurate they'd be nowadays, or how liberal he was with his estimates, but I don't think Double Fine's going to have any problem finding things to spend the cash on.

[Ingmar]

Moar established devs possibly coming to shut up and take all the money...

Chris Avellone asks people for suggestions what game would they like to potentially get kickstarted

(the volume of responses made the obsidian forums keel over. Might take a while to get them working again)

I basically already kickstarted Alpha Protocol when I preordered it and then it got delayed by a year. 

[sickrubik]

I would be happy with a Black Isle Kickstarter to make more Planescape Torment... or just an HD remake.

[Paelos]

Somebody make a game like Rome Total War, but add in more political and economic stuff like EU, and whenever you go into a spy mission, you got into little mini-game like Pirates! where you try to avoid guards. Same for assassinations.

[sickrubik]

[Fabricated]

I'm a fan of point and click adventure games, but it's been years since anything really scratched the itch. TellTale's stuff is alright, but most of their stuff is like a lot of SCUMM games where you just can't lose ever.

I mean, the whole "whoops you forgot to pick up this thing 30 hours ago you lose forever" thing of old point and clickers was retarded, but half the fun of the space quest series was all of the pretty hilarious ways to fail and die as Roger.

[Amarr HM]

I wasn't so much a fan of point click because some of them were rubbish, I was a fan of the humour. 2D is a better vehicle for humour because of our relationship with cartoon strips/comics, it's economical.

For me personally not dying was a good idea, there is better ways to hinder progression like devious puzzles.

[tmp]

All different ways they'd use to toy with those potentially dealy situations from other games were part of the humour for me. The acid bath scene in Monkey Island 2 was probably the single funniest moment of it, that i remember to this day.

[K9]

Another important Kickstarter project

[Azazel]

This sums it up a bit better for me.

The second question is more important. While an established company like Double Fine understandably sees fans immediately flocking to donate, things become much more difficult for an emerging artist working on his or her first project. While you could argue that it is the responsibility of that artist to earn his or her reputation over time, I can’t help but wonder what kinds of tools Kickstarter could introduce to facilitate discovery and fundraising for less visible names. This will become increasingly important as more established names and studios see the success of the platform and begin migrating to it. So, I suppose, my second question is this:

How can Kickstarter ensure that it remains a platform for the best ideas and projects, not merely the biggest names?

-Random blogger

Double-Fine is a major games studio, independent or not.  And there is NOT an unlimited share of capital on sites like kickstarter.  So when they swoop in with these big projects they think they cant get normal funding for (or want to fund themselves) they're essentially cannibalizing funding from say 100 projects (the average kstarter is $10k) and sinking it into one "popularized" one.  In the end, creativity is stifled... not helped.  It's like fuckin Valentino using Etsy to make his next dress.  

edit - to refine my previous comment - I'm sure that there are some people who troll kickstarter for interesting projects - but I do not in any way believe that these people provided the majority f the funds for Schaefer's game. The contributors would mostly/almost exclusively be Tim Schaefer fans who went to KS specifically in order to get a new DF/TS game made.


So talk like this has been creeping up of late regarding sites like Kickstarter, I'm not some special snowflake with this.  It's something that's gonna have to be addressed soon.  I mean for christ's sake we're talking about a studio that got in bed with EA to do "Brutal Legend."  Let us not forget this.

Note: I'm all for killing the publisher though, but just not eating the small cap crowdsource market to do it.

No, they're really not. I know of Shaefer and Doublefine If I were a huge fan of their work (instead of a bit indifferent), I'd definitely be interested in giving them some money. Probably $20-50. Now, if you for some reason think that $20-50 I have in my wallet is earmarked for "interesting kickstarter project" then you're a little bit special in your reasoning.

[CmdrSlack]

This all boils down to two people who have built their own personal brands over the years. It's like bitching about Gary Vaynerchuk ruining social media by advocating building a personal brand.

Anyone who takes the time to build a relevant, personal brand will likely find funding on Kickstarter. FFS, the entire concept of Kickstarter is leveraging social media to fund a personal brand.

Then again, this whole divergent train has been engineered by Ghambit and then had the fire stoked by Margalis. So there's that.

[MahrinSkel]

Speaking as a developer that has been pursuing a plan for about 4 months that involves eventually going on Kickstarter and raising funds, I think this is a great thing.  Until now, there has been no precedent for trying to raise cash on Kickstarter for a videogame of any significant size.  Most of the pitches in the videogame category have been student projects, where it was being used as a channel for funds from friends and family of the classes working on them.

There are a lot of genres and sub-genres that have fallen off the map of the publishers because they're not big enough niches to justify 8 figure budgets, they're not interested in anything smaller and since they own the retail channel those games simply no longer get made.  Point-and-click was one of the first to go, back in the 90's (at one point, Myst was the biggest game in history by every metric) but there's been an ongoing community for them.  There are some others that simply died out for similar reasons.  Business models are dictating game design, a trend that was always present but now has gotten completely out of control.

With all the attention this has gotten, a lot of people who had never heard of Kickstarter have.  Double Fine has "primed the pump", gotten enough video gamers onto Kickstarter that other projects have a much higher chance of success.

--Dave

[Margalis]

Honestly, to bring this back on point  a bit, I'm wondering if Double Fine is going to fall into the trap of having too much budget for the game.  At 300K, they were going to have to focus on making a very tight focused product,  multiplying the the amount of money to play with by at least 400%, you have to be concerned that they may end up with more than a little feature bloat.

Nothing prevents them from putting the money into general payroll and such.

That's another problem with something like this. Double Fine is a corporate entity with a payroll, other revenue and expenditures, etc. If they use a lot of the money on general engine improvements that help them make the game better in theory is that ok?

If they give an artist X amount of money out of the kickstarter fund and that artist spends half their time on Sesame Street 2 is that ok?

I find it very hard to believe that a small company where most people work on most things and has multiple projects going at once is going to effectively silo off X dollars for a specific project.

[UnSub]

It's probably easiest to view Double Fine's Kickstarter payments as a very, very early pre-order.

So far they've got 42k preorders and the game will cost in the realm of $15 at launch for those who didn't preorder it. Now they've got to deliver that game.

[tmp]

Another important Kickstarter project

That's considerably cheaper than a photo of Ron Gilbert smiling.

[Amaron]

Moar established devs possibly coming to shut up and take all the money...

Chris Avellone asks people for suggestions what game would they like to potentially get kickstarted

(the volume of responses made the obsidian forums keel over. Might take a while to get them working again)

Look's like we'll be seeing an Obsidian kickstarter for a turn based RPG here pretty soon.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Moar established devs possibly coming to shut up and take all the money...

Chris Avellone asks people for suggestions what game would they like to potentially get kickstarted

(the volume of responses made the obsidian forums keel over. Might take a while to get them working again)

Look's like we'll be seeing an Obsidian kickstarter for a turn based RPG here pretty soon.

I'd hit it.

[Tarami]

Obsidian? I don't know, man. As much as I like their writing and world-building, I'm just not sure about their ability to finish in a timely manner without publisher pressure. As it is, they appear to be taking as long time as every other studio but yet release all their games in the half-assed state. If they were to manage themselves, we might be looking at half a decade to get returns on the investment.

[NiX]

I don't want the game, not my thing, but I want to pay for the documentary.

[Ingmar]

Obsidian? I don't know, man. As much as I like their writing and world-building, I'm just not sure about their ability to finish in a timely manner without publisher pressure. As it is, they appear to be taking as long time as every other studio but yet release all their games in the half-assed state. If they were to manage themselves, we might be looking at half a decade to get returns on the investment.

Did you skip New Vegas? I can count the crashes/noticeable bugs I had in it on one hand, and I did just about everything.

[Amaron]

Did you skip New Vegas? I can count the crashes/noticeable bugs I had in it on one hand, and I did just about everything.

I thought New Vegas was super buggy when it came out?   Obsidian making a good game is just random luck at this point.   I'll gladly put down 50 bucks on an isometric style turn based RPG though.   Just on the off chance that it will encourage more developers to follow suit.

[Tarami]

Did you skip New Vegas? I can count the crashes/noticeable bugs I had in it on one hand, and I did just about everything.

I played the shit out of FO:NV. It was fine and enormous fun, but then again it used tried and tested technology (FO3's). Even so, it felt very unfishished, with many plotlines underdeveloped. I probably had a bug of some kind in virtually every major questline. Several times I wasn't sure if I had missed something or if the quest had bugged on me (again). Sure, most could be fixed by fast travelling, entering a console command or restarting the quest but it was a far cry from a smooth ride.

That's without even bringing up game balance.

NV was fun despite its technical issues. That's why I might consider funding an Obsidian game at all. If it wouldn't have had such engaging writing, I might aswell set my money on fire.

[Fabricated]

NV was hilariously buggy; it just had quest/physics/scripting bugs and crashed at least once literally every play session I put into it. It was still awesome and I loved the game enough to buy ALL of the DLC (when I hate DLC), but it was as typical of an Obsidian title as you can get, ignoring the fact it actually had an ending.

[Lantyssa]

Almost all of their projects are using someone else's tech, so their time estimates are shortened, but way too much for what they're trying to produce.  Obsidian having the funds to allow them enough time to add an ending and iron out the bugs is really all we could ever ask for.