Record Setting $3M Kickstarter Game Needs More Money

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Rounding out the trifecta of crappy Kickstarter news today, Tim Schafer says the $3 million you gave him to make his $400k game.....isn't enough money. Whoopsie!

Double Fine's adventure game Kickstarter was one of 2012's great success stories, bringing in over $3 million in community funding. A year later, though, it turns out that wasn't enough money to get the game finished.
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"Stretch goals" often turn into "pie-in-the-sky yeah-right never-gonna-happen" things for most kickstarters, and I bet Schafer probably thought so too. Once the money started rolling in, the zeroes all made it sound easy. But in real life, it's never that easy.

Or there's always the hookers and blow...
 
Someone needs to learn to budget. Someone people call.... Tim?
 
still 0$ from me to any kickstarted project and every day im feeling more just in that decision. suckers.
 
If they don't release a product, they 'contributers' don't have to pay correct? Someone gonna owe someone $3 million. Makes me wonder if their next kickstarter was going to be used to finish the old one. A pyramid scheme of kickstarters.
 
How much of this is due to Kickstarter and how much of it is due to a developer that isn't used to managing a fixed money supply ... I have enjoyed the Grim Dawn alpha and they appear on track to release a game without this kind of gamesmanship ... Obsidian seems to be a more tightly managed ship so we will see how they do with Project Eternity ... many of the KS games from small indie developers seem to have launched ok ... I think it might be the ones used to the publisher system that are having some growing pains ... let's not indict the whole system yet ;)
 
They probably shouldn't have gone so far with the backer rewards, that stuff costs money and probably would have covered the addtiional funds they now need.
 
I've funded several things before. Mainly music and games. And yes, one of these games was this wonderful crap-fest that is Broken Age. I really wish I'd just of thrown the $15 bucks at it just to get the game and been done. But instead, I sit here with my shirt, looking at my poster, and reading this sort of stuff. Wondering when/if I'll ever get my physical boxed set.

I'm glad I ended up pulling my funding (yet again, another large amount for the studio) for Massive Chalice just a few hours before it was finished (due to personal reasons). With the way that this was handled it really makes me wonder about their ability to deliver.
 
I only fund modest goal kickstarters that have reasonable goals, small game projects, authors who just want to fund prints of books, song writers who want to make a music video, small movies/films who want to pay for actors/equipment etc...

All of those have succeeded and I have gotten my rewards in every instance. A printed book, a video download, a DVD or a CD.
 
jpm100 said:
If they don't release a product, they 'contributers' don't have to pay correct? Someone gonna owe someone $3 million. Makes me wonder if their next kickstarter was going to be used to finish the old one. A pyramid scheme of kickstarters.
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Nope. The only way contributors don't pay is if they don't reach their goal. Now I'm not sure how it'd all work out him saying he needs more money, but presumably he'll use the money trying to make a product so even if they don't finish said product the money has already been spent. That's why kickstarter is such a crap shoot, if you want to help out you need to gauge what they're trying to do with the money the need and see if it's really realistic.

I do question costs on games, presumably most is in salaries of workers, hopefully you should have some good talent that knows how to get shit done, you don't need an entire game dev studio worth of employees though. You should have programmers/artists and that's fucking it, no administrative jobs, no secretarial, janitorial, or other service type jobs. Hell, I think the guy who wants to make the game shouldn't get a salary either because fuck him he has a dream to do this, he should work for free rather than asking everyone to pay his salary, when his dream is realized he gets to keep the spoils of his creation, but if his creation flops he shouldn't have profited in the least.
 
I don't understand how a project estimated to cost $400,000 blows away $3 million... what were the people who got all this money REALLY doing with that cash?
 
He blew 2.6 million on parties and women. The first party blew $500000 to celebrate the $3 mil he got.
 
Kickstarter is no different than handing a homeless person your money, and asking him to go buy you groceries.
 
Wrecked Em said:
Kickstarter is no different than handing a homeless person your money, and asking him to go buy you groceries.
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I don't know that I would go that far ... KS companies are just like the general business community ... there are some really good companies or great ones, lots of decent and average ones, and a few bad apples and poorly run ones ... just because this one enterprise was poorly managed doesn't mean all of them will be ...

ultimately the promise of KS still outweighs the risks (for the time being) ... if more of the big developers (especially the professional ones like Obsidian and inXile) run into problems then I would worry ... but this model for games is still very new ... a few growing pains are to be expected ... let's not throw the baby out with the bath water just yet :cool:
 
Also, this isn't the first time a developer's reach exceed his or her grasp ... cough cough Battlecruiser 3000 ... Duke Nukem Forever cough cough ... with such a high profile project and developer having problems though it will be interesting to see if some of the other developers (especially those who plan future projects) address THEIR financial management practices ... I suspect the old Black Isle alumni have much more tightly run ships ;)
 
The only kickstarter I've invested into was the one for Carmageddon: Reincarnation. While the final product has not been delivered yet they have regular updates and have already ported the original Carmageddon to iOS and Android while we wait.. And they did a fantastic job at that..
 
I think this ultimately says more about the developer Tim Shafer than it does about the general KS community ... it does highlight to game developers the need for good software project managers and development team leaders (if they didn't know this already ;) ) and given that studios like inXile and Obsidian seem to have done lots of planning and prep I have confidence that other studios will not make this mistake ... now hitting their projected launch dates, THAT is a different matter entirely as that has always been the nemesis of software projects :cool:
 
I don't get why anyone would backa product in development. A game is about the worst thing I can think to back. I've kickstarted two things. One was funding for a local free skatepark. They already had land donated and starting construction. It was getting built no matter what. The other was a rollerblading frame with suspension. It was already prototyped and tested. The money was just to buy the tooling to make the thing. With both of these there was no guess work about what the money was being used for.
 
I remember reading an article a while back that when Tim Shafer originally pitched his new game to publishers he asked for a lot more money than what he asked for on KS. Guess we know why now.
 
Backers are still getting the game, though in a 2 episode format. Tim really needs to hire a smart money guy or nobody will trust him to do what he promises.
 
Well, this is an example of what game publishers have to deal with when funding projects with game studios sometimes I guess!

Welcome to reality.
 
4saken said:
Best analogy for Kickstarter ive seen yet. 100% agree.
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How would giving money to Tim Schaefer, who is the head of Double Fine - a video game developer, to make a video game be anything like that?

The game's scope changed when they get way more money than what they were asking for. This is not the same game they only needed $400k for. Obviously, they overdid it. They could still be in trouble if no one buys the early release on Steam. At least they're not charging for both parts of the game. I like some of Double Fine's games, I may buy the early release. I think this will definitely hurt Tim Schaefer's future Kickstarters, but you shouldn't judge the whole crowdfunding thing just by him. This could just as easily happened if a developer had decided to give him more money than he was asking for and he went overboard. In that case though, the developer may have forced him to split the game into two parts and charged for both to recoup the extra money they gave him.
 
I often wonder how many KS projects are actually from well funded companies that are simply using crowdfunding to avoid risking their own capital?
 
DarkStar_WNY said:
I often wonder how many KS projects are actually from well funded companies that are simply using crowdfunding to avoid risking their own capital?
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Unless you make a deal behind closed doors this is a terrible idea. Well actually its terrible in general since you are funding both the project and kickstarter.
 
Fix Me said:
How would giving money to Tim Schaefer, who is the head of Double Fine - a video game developer, to make a video game be anything like that?

The game's scope changed when they get way more money than what they were asking for. This is not the same game they only needed $400k for. Obviously, they overdid it. They could still be in trouble if no one buys the early release on Steam. At least they're not charging for both parts of the game. I like some of Double Fine's games, I may buy the early release. I think this will definitely hurt Tim Schaefer's future Kickstarters, but you shouldn't judge the whole crowdfunding thing just by him. This could just as easily happened if a developer had decided to give him more money than he was asking for and he went overboard. In that case though, the developer may have forced him to split the game into two parts and charged for both to recoup the extra money they gave him.
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because you are getting, potentially, half of what you paid for? Hence the giving a homeless guy cash to buy your groceries and hoping you actually get everything on your list as expected back. It's a bait and switch. As more and more KS projects are coming to completion im betting we will be seeing more and more of these issues.
 
4saken said:
because you are getting, potentially, half of what you paid for? Hence the giving a homeless guy cash to buy your groceries and hoping you actually get everything on your list as expected back. It's a bait and switch. As more and more KS projects are coming to completion im betting we will be seeing more and more of these issues.
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I doubt it that all the major projects will do this ... most are being run by very professional developers and they are treating it like any other job ... schedules slip all the time and I think we can expect some of that with no penalty ... but I doubt too many of the add on features will get dropped unless they can't make them function right ;)
 
I fail to see the issue. Unless the game sucks balls, or nobody buys the first half, you'll get it all. If not, then you get a really cool first half of the game.

Maybe they're screwing you, but more than likely, it's exactly what he said, they put too ore in than 3 million could buy. It's not like the same thing didn't happen every time a new World of Warcraft, Everquest or whatever MMO/expansion came out. They were never complete. The power gamers were always bitching about content not being finished, or finding bugs that made quests impossible to complete and so on.

If you bought Vangaurd, I doubt it was ever completed and at launch, it was unplayable on all but the best rigs and even then it wasn't silky smooth.
 
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