DoubleFine seem to have attracted a bit of a mess with Psychonauts 2 funding

Quoting: bonermarineBroken age came out and it was a good game.
Massive Chalice came out and it was a good game.

Disagree on both accounts. Part 1 of Broken Age was fairly good. The puzzles were weak, but the story was interesting and I was excited to see where it went. Part 2 was flat out bad. The story completely fell apart and the whole thing fell flat. The game looked great, the art style was terrific, but beyond that, I felt it was a bitter disappointment overall.

Massive Chalice came out on time, I'll give them that, but I thought it was a rather mediocre game.

QuoteIf you don't like DF, then don't support them. I'm sick of you faggots complaining about them all the time. The people who love their games will continue to support them.

There's no need for that kind of language, that's very inappropriate.


Last edited by Keyrock on 2 January 2016 at 6:13 am UTC

FWIW, I liked both parts of Broken Age. Not one of my favorite games ever, but I had a good time playing it. After the first half, I think I adjusted my expectations appropriately and was able to appreciate having decent main characters with solid acting, a few zany plot twists, classy one-of-a-kind graphics, and a good ending. There were some innovative puzzles, though some more fun than others. The knot one was a bit annoying really, but it was an experiment in trying something new rather than yet-another-inventory-puzzle, and some experiments do fail.

Are we doing this again?

Games go over budget all the time. Games get cancelled all the time. Yes, the cancellation of Spacebase DF-9 could have been handled better, but it didn't sell and development had to stop.

I don't put to much value in a video posted by a guy who "thinks #GamerGate are OK", and there's nothing new in this video.

If you don't like taking risks, avoid crowdfunding, Early Access and investments.

Quoting: SketchStickI'm just disappointed that you felt this warranted an article, this is not gaming news...

Also I'm getting a little tired of people trying to paint Double Fine in a bad light when Spacebase DF-9 was the only game they failed to deliver.

Some of us do find it interesting, and it's interesting to me. Not everything we post here is brand new news.

As has been pointed out Broken Age was also terribly handled. I also own Massive Chalice, and it was so boring i regretted it.

Quoting: fleskIf you don't like taking risks, avoid crowdfunding, Early Access and investments.

This is my point of the article, to simply warn people of dangers like I always do :)

Thank you for posting this TheBoss! As the author of the video states: "[he is] simply stating the facts from their own literature and that if they wanted to, they could take the money and run."

The problem is gamers see those sliders and with the flick of the mouse crank it up to see massive ROI, and they think cha-ching, I'm going to be rich – what could possibly go wrong? (famous last words)

And this means they might spend excessive proportions of their disposable income which could be better spent elsewhere ---- including other kickstarter projects who might be more deserved of their money!

Yes, thanks for posting this, although it isn't really news that some studios don't need crowdfunding to get a game going but just find it too convenient to dump all the risk on the consumer and cash in all the profit. Double Fine are known to be one of the worst offenders if you follow the news

Yes, Gamergate have their gripes with Tim Schafer too, exactly for those ant-consumer shenanigans. So what? Doesn't render the opinions in this video invalid, at least if you're none of the ad-hominem folks.

Quoting: Keyrock

Quoting: bonermarineBroken age came out and it was a good game.
Massive Chalice came out and it was a good game.

Disagree on both accounts. Part 1 of Broken Age was fairly good. The puzzles were weak, but the story was interesting and I was excited to see where it went. Part 2 was flat out bad. The story completely fell apart and the whole thing fell flat. The game looked great, the art style was terrific, but beyond that, I felt it was a bitter disappointment overall.

Massive Chalice came out on time, I'll give them that, but I thought it was a rather mediocre game.

Subjective statements though, wouldn't you agree? Making games that not everyone likes but generally well received (76 metacritic if that means anything) doesn't make you fraudsters, nor does being late on delivering the game.

I wonder how much of it is just lingering dislike over his stance on that gamergate nonsense last year. (Like his GDC thing.)

Regarding crowdfunding, I think it only makes sense for open source projects with public repositories. At least then, your investment isn't lost even if the project hits delays or problems, since the IP will belong to the community and can be forked if necessary.

Funding proprietary stuff, in my opinion is almost like a masochistic exercise in order to get perks that have an artificial limited availability.

As much as I like Double Fine and their games, I sadly have to agree regarding the sales numbers displayed in the Fig campaign. The only sales that really count are the retail sales before Psychonauts has been available for a few cents per copy.
While I don't expect them to really let Fig Publishing just go bankrupt and run with their investor's money, I'd still consider investing to be risky, simply because it's hard to impossible to estimate the number of sales of Psychonauts 2.

Seriously? Are we still pandering to the gamergate narrative?
We are talking about a company that has delivered on every title they ever kickstarted, in case of Broken Age indeed delivered far MORE than they promised.
On top of that, they had two early access games, one that was completed, and one that didn't sell and had to be cancelled. Rather than drop it instantly, they did some extra work and released the source code.
They've also ported all their games to Linux, and did so before supporting Linux was cool.

What an awful evil company.