When Tim Schafer and Double Fine kicked off the Kickstarter game-funding boom with their $3.2 million Adventure Game effort last year (money raised after initially asking for just $400,000), gamers and developers both wondered if the company had finally found a way around the publisher-centric game funding model once and for all. Unfortunately, the company's Kickstarter experiment, now being called Broken Age, isn't going quite as well as hoped, with development going over budget and even a limited "first half" release being pushed back to next year.
In a lengthy message to backers that was posted on the game's Kickstarter page, Schafer basically admits that his eyes were bigger than his budget. The game is now shaping up to cost more money than Double Fine had raised through Kickstarter and from subsequent "tip jar" donations. What's more, the pace of development meant that the first half of the game wouldn't be ready until July 2014, with a final release looking likely in 2015. For a game that had an original asking budget of $400,000 and an original target date of October 2012, these are big problems.
"I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it’s hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle," Schafer wrote, dropping the names of some of his best-known titles. "There’s just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is."
"I want to point out that Broken Age’s schedule changes have nothing to do with the team working slowly," Schafer continued. "It’s just taking a while because I designed too much game, as I pretty much always do. But we’re pulling it in, and the good news is that the game’s design is now 100 percent done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger."
Rather than seek out a publisher late in the dev cycle or going back to fans for more money, Double Fine has simply decided to take a hit on the budget overages the project has suffered. At the same time, it has made "modest cuts" to the project in order to release a development version of the first half of the game on Steam Early Access in January 2014. The funds from those early Steam sales will help fuel the development of the rest of the game, and a polished version of the first half should now be ready for April or May of next year.
These kinds of budget overruns and project delays are extremely common in the world of traditionally published games, so it's not shocking that a major fan-funded effort could run into the same problems. Still, it's disappointing news for those who felt that crowdfunding would create a world where smaller, more personal, fan-focused projects could be released without the delays and bloated budgets of the AAA publishers.
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