Double Fine Adventure

"kickstarter project is kind of the opposite of pirating". I love it.

Maybe even Kickstarter is the dual(1) of pirating?

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality

Thankyou for your analysis.

http://i.qkme.me/35z247.jpg

And like he states in the video:

8. If the game does blow up in their faces, there will be video evidence of it for all the backers to enjoy.

It's Tim Schafer going back to a game genre where he produced games that people (rightly) have an undying love for.

The only surprise with this is that you wonder why he didn't do it already.

I woke my pregnant wife up 10 minutes ago to tell her that I'm sending Kickstarter $15 to back a project because they are the ones who made the games we played together years ago and will make the same type of game with the money. She almost danced to the news. We live in some city you never heard of, in Turkey.

Tim Shafer has had great critical but not commercial success in recent years. Double Fine is a legit company that has shipped games both large and small. In fact they've shipped 5 smallish titles in the past 2 years so you know they can do this one. There is a huge nostalgia factor as many people, such as myself, grew up on Tim Shafer adventure games in the early 90s.

On top of that this is an old school adventure game being made by Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert - the two people who INVENTED the genre. It's a perfect storm of success.

marketing -- schafer has built up sizable good will so he can bring a lot of attention + third-party passion to his kickstarter project.

Industry insiders correct me if I'm wrong, but Grim Fandango was pretty much the final nail in the coffin (no pun intended) of the pure adventure genre, because it had terrible sales. Simultaneously, it was a true masterpiece - one of the best in the genre. So it's not surprising that lots of people grew up loving adventure games and now have the disposable income and the nostalgia to fund a Kickstarter project, while at the same time making this a risky project for a game publisher.

Tim Schafer is a reinvent-the-wheel kind of guy, and most of the giant publishers prefer to polish their existing wheels. They run very risk-averse business models -- preferring to milk big, cash cow franchises for all they're worth before being dragged, kicking and screaming, into new IP. They'd much rather invest hundreds of millions into Sequel #235 of Big Franchise X than invest even a fraction of that budget across a spectrum of innovative, but less self-evidently commercial titles. It's not at all dissimilar to the way the big-studio movie business works.

Schafer is the kind of guy who wins awards and accolades, but doesn't move as many millions as, say, "Call of Duty 45: Modern Ware 38: Future Warfare." His stuff is wildly inventive, but it's quirky and plays to a (relatively) niche audience.

But I'd argue that Schafer and Kickstarter are a great pair, precisely because of that dynamic. He's got his fanbase. While that fanbase is smaller than the Big Studio Franchise customer base, it's much more devoted. And if he can work directly with his loyal fanbase, ideally even growing it in the process, then he can do well financially and operate with greater creative freedom.

I once spent an incredibly frustrating period trying to sell a game demo to a number of publishers, all of whom thought it looked and played great, but didn't have a slot for it because their slate was full of licenses and franchises.

Publishers are ever-increasingly risk-averse - particularly when modern console games cost as much as they do to produce (eg. >$50MM). Movie licenses and sequels tend to do well, so that's where bulk of the money goes.

More innovative/creative games, (and Double Fine's are definitely in this category), are often critical successes, but perform poorly in financial terms. (We could argue as to whether this is due to people simply not wanting those kind of games, or whether it's due to publishers not committing to really pushing them).

I'm really glad to see Tim trying something like this, and really, really hope it works out. I'd love to see another viable mechanism for indie game development.

I believe that its because his games typically don't sell as well as the publishers' other games. Psychonauts, for example, was a critically acclaimed game, but flopped commercially.

People like to chalk this up to the publishers being stupid or conservative, and there may be some elements of that. But I doubt a publisher would leave money on the table if it was as sure of a bet as the internet community makes it out to be.

For all the talk of folks crying out, "bring back adventure games". The simple fact is that many many times more people queue up to buy the latest Call of Duty than will ever buy any adventure game.

No different than the movie business. Publisher's want $100M hits, not $10M hits.

Do you think there is ever a risk to being "over-funded"? I know it sounds stupid, but it's an honest question.

Open engine: http://www.residualvm.org/

Updated graphics: http://forums.residualvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=100

All I really wish for is non-Steam and possibly Linux.

What better use of one's money than to change the world? To help get something created that you will enjoy?

Imagine if the world didn't have ice cream or steak? How much money would you pay to live in a world with those things?

Elevation dock: $1,052,809 w/ 43 hours to go Double Fine Adventure: $1,026,265 w/ 32 DAYS to go

There is no doubt in my mind that Double Fine will obliterate the record.

"PC" these days is often a general name for "desktop or laptop computer" - it doesn't mean it won't have a mac version.

The gaming audience on windows is still far bigger than osx.

Read the FAQ first. In there they state that their top-of-the-list priority if they exceed the initial 400 000 dollar is supporting other platforms.

Maybe in a couple of years somebody will talk them into adding it to a Humble Bundle. I donated, on the off chance of it someday running on a platform I own, because hey, at least I can get a neat game soundtrack and documentary.

I'm not sure if it's a match featurewise, but http://indiegogo.com looks and feels very similar.

Nikodemus Siivola used it to fund SBCL threading improvements: http://www.indiegogo.com/SBCL-Threading-Improvements-1

  limited-edition t-shirts
  limited-edition action figures
  dinner with the devs
  cool gold-colored cd/dvd/usbkey/etc with the software
  your likeness as a minor character
  limited-edition plush toys

Basically any kind of promotional tchotchke you can think of. It would have little intrinsic worth but it would be RARE which means that if the product became well-loved it would be worth something down the line when you decided you no longer had room for it - and until then it's an item that tells people something about you. "Oh man is that the commemorative bong for Psychonauts 2? Holy cow I loved that game."

As far as I'm aware, this is a completely different project from Psychonauts 2. I don't think Notch had any real significant involvement in this Kickstarter campaign.