Double Fine raises $1m in less than 24hrs on Kickstarter | Hacker News Reader

Double Fine raises $1m in less than 24hrs on Kickstarter

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229 pointspkrumins63 comments

I think Rock, Paper, Shotgun made a good observation in their article on this[1]:

> And it’s impossible not to observe that on a day when gamers give a million dollars for a game that doesn’t yet exist, Ubisoft’s customers couldn’t play games they’d paid for and received.

The old model of publishers having excessive power over game developers can't die quick enough.

[1]: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/09/double-fine-kicks...

Yes but consider this is Tim Schafer. I see his name on a product, 99% of the time I'm going to pay. I saw Trenched on xbox arcade and bought it immediately, whilst any other game it'll be 2 weeks or more before I buy it even though I have the points to get rid of.

Similarly I see a John Scalzi or Terry Pratchett book and its bought, no thinking necessary. Again, if I see Futurama on TV it's going to be on.

Would I pay $20 in advance to get this? Yes, I pre-order shit regularly. Would I pay it 6 months in advance? Meh probably.

You have either to convince a few people with lots of money to fund your project, or a lot of people to give you a small amount of money.

Both options require some amount of reputation on your part and/or some goodwill from the patrons.

One of these options will leave you in a worse position. I know which one I would prefer.

I think that's exactly the point. People want to buy stuff from whoever they like. This is the same as the Louis CK show. I like these guys, they're releasing something new, I'll pay (and wait for it if needed).

Whether or not this would work for indie/unknown developers is a whole other story, I think. The main point is direct funding.

"Whether or not this would work for indie/unknown developers is a whole other story, I think."

I agree that the jury's still out for the little guy, but I'd argue that the little guy simply needs to hustle that much harder to get noticed.

In theory, there's little reason why a compelling-looking presentation about a video game, from a relative unknown, wouldn't catch fire if marketed correctly. Look at the Elevation Dock, for instance. Different category altogether, but the video demonstrates the appeal of the product, the thought that went into its design, and the personality of its creator (unknown to the general public prior to the Kickstarter project).

A "Startup Tim Schafer" would need to be his (or her) own marketing team. He'd want to -- probably need to -- crack the top Kickstarter listings, and hopefully earn some press pickup, by making an undeniably killer presentation. And he'd need to make damned sure to ship something in the end. (While it's true that Kickstarter isn't technically a pre-sales site, a lot of users seem to treat it that way. If you're an upstart developer with no AAA track record, your Kickstarter launch is your track record; you'll have a razor-thin margin of error).

No doubt Tim Schafer has a lot of advantages over Startup Tim Schafer. But the hill isn't impossible for Startup Tim to climb. If anything, I think the existence of Kickstarter makes things a lot easier for him. Kickstarter can be an excellent marketing tool every bit as much as it's a funding tool.

Agree, and this will be true for every art/media creation soon enough. We are seeing the future here, and we can expect more and more developpers to jump on the wagon.

In a way, change is all good for the middle-men as well, since they will have to work hard to provide value on top of what the developpers are doing. Which is what they should have always been doing.

Which is interesting in light of electromagnetic's sibling comment.

While croudsourced funding and whatnot are supposed to promote long-tail indie productions, here we're seeing that a large part of this project's quick success is due to Tim Schafer's reputation. If it were Joe Jones wanting $400k to make I doubt he'd get it so easily even if the game were the exact same.

It is natural that Mr. Nobody is not going to get funded at this level without the slightest credential. After all, it's like marketing yourself: you have to make people believe you can deliver something of value, and track record is essential. My original comment was rather considering the current high profile developpers who are attached to publishers by contract. They may decide, following this example, to start some projects using the same model with their reputations. Then, you'd have to wonder how publishers would react once they realise they are not (as much) needed anymore.

Going it yourself you still have the chicken-and-egg situation of getting known and making products. What it allows you to do though is start small and lay progressively larger eggs. ;)

This is a much more typical indie game funding scenario:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bravadowaffle/roboarena-...

I'm fairly sure that this was the second attempt at getting funding on Kickstarter, the first failed to raise enough funds.

Well that's understandable, it makes sense that a developer would want to build up their reputation before attempting a bigger budget game like this. Just make a few smaller games and use the success of those to help raise funds for a larger one.

Although impressive, this still doesn't include the difficult bootstrapping step. What this example, along with Louis CK, Trent Reznor, and Radiohead show, is that if you're already famous via traditional means, then you can crowdsource enough money for your 3rd, 4th, or 8th production to go indie. But how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the "traditional" media industry?

In fact if you are well-known, it's not clear you even need Kickstarter at all. Einstürzende Neubauten, a niche-well-known industrial band, raised a substantial amount of money just by adding a subscription feature on their website in 2002, for example.

> But how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the "traditional" media industry?

You work for free or very little money either by having a day job or living the life of a starving artist. Nobody is going to fund your first game, because your first game is going to be terrible. Heck, your first half dozen games are probably going to be terrible. People like to think of guys like Notch (Minecraft) or Edmund Mcmillen (Super Meat Boy) as overnight successes, but they made games for a long time before they made it big. If you are lucky, you can scrape enough together in your early career to pay your rent and eat. Heck even the legendary John Carmack was making little games for Softdisk then the commander keen games before id struck gold with Wolfenstien and Doom.

Fwiw, the Edmund Mcmillen example isn't really accurate; he made a considerable amount of money from his previous game, the IGF-award-winner Gish, that he co-developed with Alex Austin and Josiah Pisciotta. Super Meat Boy was his follow-up.

Gish only made sales of $120k[1]. Edwin worked with a publisher and as you mentioned worked with other people, so I don't think he made a considerable amount of money there. In interviews and podcasts he frequently mentions being 'poor' for a long time while making games.

Even disregarding all that, he was making games before he made Gish, so the example still holds.

My point was, nobody is going to pay you while you practice, unless you get a job with BigCorp as part of a team and work your way up.

[1]http://www.gameproducer.net/2007/05/09/sales-stats-gish-1210...

I think this is a bit of a strawman-- How does somebody who's not already well known raise money for their first video game, comedy show or album with the traditional media industry?

If big artists are able to cut their ties to Big Content using crowdfunding, that will cost them a lot more money than if independent artists who they never would have signed anyway does. If the publishers lose profitability, and there's less revenue being extracted from the content industry by corporate middlemen, that can only improve the ecosystem for the little guys.

Well, many do so: among other examples, Trent Reznor, Radiohead, Louis CK, and Tim Schafer are people who've raised substantial money from the traditional media industry without first having a hit. To replace that, which I'm interested in, we need a way that they can replace their first major success. For example, what alternate funding model would've allowed Tim Schafer to get The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) funded via some other mechanism than LucasArts ponying up the money? Or: what non-TVT funding source would've paid for Reznor's Pretty Hate Machine (1989)? I hope it's possible, but to me, that's the hard question, much harder than answering how to pay for Reznor's later, post-fame albums.

Not quite true, lesser known developers have been successful on Kickstarter in the past. An example off the top of my head is the game "No Time To Explain" from relatively unknown developer tinyBuild[1]. The key here seems to be producing a cool looking prototype to show off to Kickstarter, then gathering funds to polish the game, add content and finish development.

It seems like Kickstarter is more than capable of helping unknown developers generate funds to support development.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296948465/no-time-to-ex...

> But how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the "traditional" media industry?

How about apprenticeships? Start off by working for a well-known person. Build your reputation there, with the aim of becoming independent one day.

Probably the same way many "iphone accessory" start-ups started on kickstarter. Show some kind of prototype, impress people and get them to believe in your vision, just like "real" investors would.

You work hard. Play small venues for little money or code in the hours after work, and roll the limited profits you make from that into something bigger. As independent artists and developers have been doing since money has existed. You think that 'traditional means' will bankroll you if you're unproven? In order to get a studio's interest you need to have fans already.

Notch pulled it off with Minecraft.

That's indeed a good example. Now we just need 4-5 more examples to prove it's repeatable rather than a fluke. :)

There are many examples in the open source world.

In music, why not bieber, rebecca black, and soulja boy?

Would DHH count?

Does Amanda Hocking count? (http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-aut...)

That's just after a few minutes of thinking. I believe I could come up with several more pretty easily.

Add musician Jonathan Coulton to that list: makes ~$500,000 a year without having ever signed on to a major label.

True, in indie music that's possible, though that also predates the internet; e.g. Fugazi made millions in the 90s with self-distribution (Ian MacKaye's estimated net worth is something like $20 million these days). Would be curious if it's accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant in frequency.

What I don't understand about this argument, every time I see it, is how do you think Trent Reznor, Louis CK, Radiohead, etc. got to the point where they could trade on their good name?

Do you think Louis CK was just sitting on his ass and then, BLAMMO! FAME!: he was a superstar comedian?

No, something tells me all these examples are of people who worked their ass off under the traditional system, to a point where they can now buck that system.

So what will be the answer under this new "non-traditional" system? Same as it ever was: work your ass off.

Or more to the point. How do you crowdsource if you don't have the name recognition and track-record to trade on? You better be one hell of a salesman.

What if your kick starter comes with a recommendation from a big name like Louis CK or Trent Resnor?

And besides, it's hard for the little guy anyways, but pre-Internet it was a LOT harder.

Is this the first case of something getting significantly funded on KickStart with nothing to show other than a promise?

As others have mentioned... Tim Schafer (and Ron Gilbert) have a hell of a track record. They have an incredibly loyal fan base, and a series of past successes. The reason why Tim Schafer was able to raise $1M in less than 24 hours was because A) he's Tim of Legend and B) there is a market hungry for adventure games like the ones Tim and Ron made.

Markus Perrson (Notch) had something tangible to show and for people to play before he started accepting payments for Minecraft. He was effectively a nobody in the industry, but he had something playable.

Even Tarn Adams (Toady One) had releases of Dwarf Fortress before he accepted and attempted to live off of donations. Again, a nobody in the industry, but he had something playable.

No Time to Explain? Had a flash game before they did a KickStarter project.

Project Zomboid? They had demo videos to show.

It's something I used to tell my boss -- quit trying to sell stuff to customers you refuse to let any of us developers start actual work on. Let us build a good prototype then let's go sell it.

-----

Is this a first? Can anyone show an example where there was funding behind something that didn't even have anything to show?

Color.

Ha ha ha, I slay myself.

But in seriousness, I threw my money into the ring because I have really craved a solid adventure game. I know these guys will take a solid crack at it, and at the very least, I will get to watch the game development process unfold on a very personal and intimate level.

$15 seems like a low price to watch an adventure game's development process, AND get the end result.

Well, the only real promise here is documentary (as it's been made clear that the game may fail)—and promo video can be counted as a pretty good demo for that.

They have raised over 11 dollars per second since lunching the kickstarter.

I can't imagine a game studio that deserves it more than Double fine, they are going to make the best adventure game ever made.

I'm not so sure. A big budget and high expectations can sandbag even the best creative team.

It's not over yet.

Anybody want to take a wild guess on what their funding will be after 30 days of quieter exposure?

We can only see their kickstarter funding. They also have the higher-tier funding brackets they've been advertising on their site. My guess is they've probably had another $50,000-$200,000 put in at that upper bracket (one or two people are probably crazy/rich enough).

It's interesting that crowdfunding could really be a sustainable model for game development going forward; Double fine basically have all their development costs paid up front, so any extra sales on steam or whatever will be pure profit. I don't think it's a model that would work for every game, but it could be an interesting direction for small-medium studios like double fine to pursue; say once every 6-18 months they come up with another game they want to put out there, see if they can get it crowd funded, then if it gets funded they can go ahead with it. They can still do their more mainstream XBLA games etc. as their bread and butter, and use these games to keep the studio busy in between more traditional games.

The other interesting point is the "pay what you want" part of the model: people can put in $1 and just see how the game turns out, or they can put in $15 to get a copy of the game or release, or the really dedicated fans can pay more to get extra bonuses like lunch with Tim. This is a huge change from the traditional "one price for all" game pricing. It's also great that basically all of the money raised is going towards the game and the studio that made it.

I'm guessing that the "early spike" can't reach more than 20% of their total audience. So if they don't smash the Kickstarter record and reach 5 million I'll be amazed. Even 10 million is completely reasonable.

I'd place my bet on a little over 2 million :-)...

I think you are very much underselling them. They are offering an adventure game with advance beta access for 15 bucks, which is probably the same price it will sell for eventually. Add on the usual kickstarter upsells, and the fact that 16,000 people bought into it day one, and you are looking at at least 5 million IMO.

Yeah, it's a complete shot in the dark :-)...

What would a realistic cost be for a game like the one they are proposing?

Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists, musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising, etc.

Well, they said it would be a small team of 6-7 people, and their aim is to finish for October. With that math, we're looking at those devs being paid around 70k a year, give or take. Which is probably about right.

I'm not sure how taxes affect the money raised from Kickstarter -- but I assume the plan from Double Fine was to get a bunch of the money from the internet, and then throw in a bit of their own.

As for creating an adventure game, it's not a very large technical challenge, for the most part. 7-8 quality devs for 8 months? I can believe they could bust out an adventure game, at a low fidelity art style.

The biggest costs to an adventure game would be asset creation. Drawing everything, or modelling everything. That's where the money will go primarily.

$300,000 is before they sell anything. If the game was even just moderately successful they'd probably make that much again in sales. So the $300k number may have been the number they figured they'd need to get far enough to convince someone to advance them the rest of the money against future sales.

It's pretty amazing how we just had an article on HN about how the kickstarter fundraising record was about to be broken, and then Double Fine comes along and obliterates the previous record in under 24 hours.

I wonder how much awareness was raised by Notch mentioning Psychonauts days earlier.

The timing was perfect for Double Fine, it's all pretty amazing.

I hope Kickstarter has giant cheques.

This will be my first kickstarter contribution. I'm a huge fan of Grim Fandango, and I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Grim Fandango was the most immersive and epic experience I've ever had while playing a video game.

Full Throttle comes very close.

I don't play video games much these days, but I think it's safe to say that Tim Schafer is one of the best writers in the industry. Maybe that doesn't mean much, but God do I love his characters!

My first too! After being on the fence on so many other projects, finally committing to one feels pretty good. Part of a neat little group of people helping in some small way to get something going. Now that I've done one I can see how it would be easy to get hooked funding all sorts of projects.

This is an important event in the democratization of venture funding. Y Combinator and other incubators are making startup funding as efficient as a traditional bank loan. Kickstarter funding products is another step forward.

Did they advertise this long before they launched on KickStarter? How did people find out so quickly otherwise?

I launched a kickstarter campaign myself and I'm doing terribly. I look around and see all sorts of weird campaigns getting funded and can't help but think: What am I doing wrong? People in real life tell me they like my product, yet on kickstarter it's going no where. So I guess it's safe to assume, they either lied to me and my product is undesirable, no one knows about my campaign despite me trying to get featured on design blogs, or I'm so repulsively ugly in my video that I drive people away.

It probably started with a Tim Schafer tweet (50k followers). I primarily follow other game devs and damn near everyone tweeted the link. At one point 2 hours after launch my stream had 10 tweets in a row with a link. Game devs are heavily followed by gamers and media so everyone picked it up almost instantly.

Even better is that every game dev and every gamer wanted to see this succeed so it wasn't just one tweet but a stream. Every gaming website I know had threads with people excitedly yelling out milestones. Notch let his 578k followers know that he pledged 10k.

To be honest after just a few hours in it was almost impossible to not know about. Even HN had multiple links with discussion.

Power of the internet my friend, they did not advertise it at all until the project was live, there was no coverage of the impending launch besides Tim said on Twitter "big announcement coming" an hour before.

Can you link us to your product? Kickstarter is some part luck and a large part making something people want.

Power of the internet my friend

Come on, is that really a helpful comment? It's not like he posted his project on the "non-internet" Kickstarter and that's why it's doing poorly.

I would imagine Kickstarter success comes with fame and marketing. If you're famous, all it takes is a tweet. If not, you'll have to work hard at getting the word out and hope that maybe someone else famous will take notice.

I saw it on Reddit, where I suspect the wave grew dramatically. Have you tried submitting your project to Reddit? Note: submitting at the right time of day is quite crucial I suspect.

Next step: let's have Yu Suzuki put ShenMue 3 as a project on Kickstarter so that they can start funding the game. It may be the best opportunity ever to get the game done.

The production costs for the first Shenmue game were in the neighborhood of 50 million dollars, which made it the most expensive video game at the time. A worthy sequel would take a lot of money to get made. I'd rather the series stay buried than be botched. Let's all be thankful that cheap Shenmue MMO cash-in never saw the light of day.

Well, the cost of the original ShenMue was huge because there were a number of R&D efforts going into it. There were no middleware engines at that time, everything had to be created from scratch (remember that development started on the Saturn, not the Dreamcast) so I would not take the first figure as a reliable benchmark for a production of this magnitude in 2010s. There are many complex games being made those days with much lower budgets (rather in the 10-20 millions range), a testament to productivity increase over time. 3D asset creation has gone a long way since 1997-1998.

I doubt a Kickstarter effort would be a silver bullet to get the game funded in its entirety, but it could well be a good place to start from and then have other partners (publishers or other investors) jump in to help fund the rest later on while work goes on.

I believe the goal of such a crowdsourcing effort for ShenMue 3 would also be to assess the market size for such a sequel. Honestly, no big publisher is going to bet on ShenMue and pour money in it. They are too risk-adverse. If it were the happen, the community, the fans would have to lead the way.

Absolutely incredible. Just shows how helpful Kickstarter can be. Although they did benefit from some strong media coverage and having significant name recognition, $1 million is still ridiculous. I am also really impressed by how many donations there were at the highest pay brackets.

I'm really interested in seeing conclusions drawn later on about the effect of this kind of preemptive crowd-based funding on the developers themselves and their process. Obviously there is a difference in state of mind between a team working on a game with nothing but hopes and anxieties that their game will be well-received and sell, versus a team whose customers have paid them before development has even started.

The big question, of course, is how the team will handle it. Maybe they'll become overconfident, or feel less motivated to succeed than otherwise. Or, on the other hand, maybe they'll feel unpressured and able to exercise creativity more freely and naturally without those worries.

It will be interesting to see how the extra money affects the game. They said they are going to inject all of it into development but since they want this to be out by October-ish they are going to have to cut scope eventually.

I honestly hope they bump out the date like six months and go bigger rather than getting it done for October and then using the extra cash to do things like porting the game to other platforms.

Hell reaching 5 million is not out of the question and that could keep a team of 10-15 people employed for two years at the minimum. They could reach a point where they literally can't spent money fast enough if they actually want to make this game with small team.

Kickstarter is making a killing!

I've never heard of this guy though I played full throttle back in the day. What were his channels for making this known? Was it only on http://www.doublefine.com/?

He's a big name in gaming, and probably reached out to a lot of people through gaming press which in turn follow his twitter account. Let's not forget this isn't just Tim Schafers company, I think Ron Gilbert has a lot of pull as well. And Double Fine is a well-rounded developer with a solid dedicated user base.

Kickstarter will take 5% of that and Amazon another 2.9%. Still, that's likely a lot less than a publisher would take :)

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