> So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies
Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since).
> But when gradually their companies hired professional management
Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).
Judging by your comments you weren't a backer, so here's an alternate point of view...
> Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).
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As one of the Broken Age backers, I think you're overly harsh on Double Fine. Personally, I feel I've gotten more than 10 times my money's worth despite Act 2 not being finished yet.
You describe it as massively late, but is that fair? The original plan was "we'll make a flash adventure for 300k", but because of the large budget they changed that to "we'll make a cross-platform, voice acted, hand-drawn custom engine game with a longer schedule" and I'm okay with that.
I got to see the entire design and development process behind the screen, which was super neat. I saw the hard discussion on decreasing scope vs delaying the game, the discussion whether to gut Act 2 or release the first part and use those funds to create an Act 2 worth of the original scope.
I think the art, music and voice acting is gorgeous. The puzzles were a bit underwhelming, but everything I've heard is that the difficulty curve is better in Act 2. All in all, for the 15 (or was it 25?) dollar backing I feel the project was a great success, massively exceeding my expectations about what I'd get for the money.
Yeah, I backed it and I was pretty happy with what I got, too. There is a new Tim Schaefer adventure game in the world. In part because of the $15 I contributed.
I thought Broken Age was fantastic, although I missed the original announcement and picked it up normally through Steam.
I think the puzzles are only underwhelming in retrospect. I would have like the game to be longer, but the visuals and audio were really top notch. I found the story to be really superb as well.
I used to work in the animation industry. Mostly at John K's studio Spümcø. I had a ringside seat for the debacle that was "Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon". All of the things I'd heard about on the original production of Ren and Stimpy played out before my eyes. Basically I got to see what happens when the whole production is run by an obsessive perfectionist who has nobody who can say "no, we can't afford to do this".
And if you look at a ton of the animation out there, you can see the other side of this: studios run by people who only see the bottom line, who focus group the life out of everything halfway interesting and only ever deliver generic content.
But when you get enough people in management who actually care about making good work, something can start to happen. Fred Seibert, for instance - he ran the "What A Cartoon!" incubator series at Cartoon Network, "Oh yeah! Cartoons" at Nickelodeon, and now runs a Youtube channel called Frederator. Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, and Adventure Time all came out of these various incubators. He's built space after space to find talented young cartoonists and give them more enough rope to hang themselves. Or to make something amazing.
You don't just need professional management. You need management who gives a fuck about making good stuff, and can negotiate with the obsessed lunatics who actually make the things when they start to get overambitious. You need management that is willing to make space to experiment and take risks with small projects.
There seem to be pockets of this in video games right now. Sony's been funding a lot of little weird things; Microsoft's had its hands in a few too. But then there are also titans like EA who buy up quirky Popcaps and turn all their gorgeous, laid-back games into IAP orgies.
That's sort of the point being made though. If you give more leeway to developers over professional management, there's a greater probability of projects going over-budget or falling behind schedule (Peter Molyneaux's games have been an example of this more than once), but there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet.
I think the answer is that you really need both types to make things work -- an Al Lowe or Roberta Williams or Tim Schafer with a tremendous amount of creative leeway that also serves as the "client" and a project manager tasked with keeping everyone on track and negotiating with the client over what can reasonably be accomplished given current deadlines / budget.
Also, for what it's worth, I absolutely love Broken Age. I mean, yes, it needs a Part 2, but it's very clear that a lot of love went into the design of that game. That's not so apparent in the latest Halo or Call of Duty.
> there's also more opportunity for some absolutely crazy amazing stuff -- e.g. Grim Fandango would never have happened if someone had to justify it with a spreadsheet.
I'm not saying you need only project managers to make stuff happen. I'm saying you need project managers as well as creators to make sure stuff gets delivered. We have seen how many kickstarters projects led by creators only have miserably failed or under-delivered.
As a backer of many Kickstarter projects, I would much rather back a project led by a creative person than a business-oriented project manager (in other words, a producer).
A lot of Kickstarter video game projects have failed to deliver on time, but they were also extremely aggressive in terms of time and money (even if they didn't say so). You cannot make a game today for $500,000 without cutting corners (such as salaries). Even the "massive" amount of money that Broken Age raised would only cover 30 people's salaries for a year. AAA games today have hundreds of people on the payroll, with development cycles of 3-5 years.
I'm not mad that they were over-eager and more than a little naive. A lot of these projects were from people who hadn't made a game since 1998. Game designers like Tim Schafer (and Jane Jensen, Charles Cecil, Aaron Conners and Chris Jones, Al Lowe, Ron Gilbert, Lori and Corey Cole, Ragnar Tornquist and others) should be able to work on what they excel at: making (adventure) games. With some exceptions, they weren't able to do so for more than a decade. It would be nice if all of the games from these projects were released (and were good), but I don't feel any sense of outrage if it doesn't work out that way.
Imagine if creating a painting cost $1 million, and Picasso had spent the last fifteen years of his life twiddling his thumbs instead of pursuing his art. Or better yet, look at Orson Welles's late career, where he could barely get anything produced. If only someone had just handed him a blank check, how many more Citizen Kanes could have been made (or Touches of Evil for that matter)?
There's a lot of outrage when a publisher interferes with an anticipated game, by rushing it to market broken or changing the creative direction or outright canceling it. Kickstarter backers have shown themselves to not have a whole lot more patience, although at least they don't wield as much power. I presume that we've seen the end of adventure games on Kickstarter, given all the bad blood. That's too bad.
Creative endeavors are notoriously difficult to budget and plan and bring in on a deadline, and even more so when it's on the cheap -- in short, shit happens.
No. You need project managers to reduce the risk of stuff not being delivered. To do so, most of the time you have also to reduce creative opportunities. Therefore, if you're not strict to spritesheets, you get bigger chances of stuff not being delivered, but you also get bigger chances of stuff being brilliant.
The initial project was to develop an unspecified games and go along for the ride even if it crashes and burn. Compared to later kickstarters Double Fine Adventure was not very specific about what it would be...
I personally liked Act 1 (even if the puzzles were a tad simple) and I'm really looking forward to the Act 2.
Now, I personally see backing on Kickstarter as Patronage. I'm giving money to artists because I like what they've done in the past or because I think that they should do well but I'm not looking on a return of investment. For me, I'm giving money in order to support arts that I like and in the hope that more of the kind of arts that I like is produced but I fully acknowledge the risks and the fact that I'm paying a lot more as a backer than if I just waited to pick up the game on sale a few month later.
Not quite. The project was an "old-school adventure game" of a then yet to be defined idea. The $300k that was asked had been budgeted for a short, simple game that could be made by a small team in a few months.
When they got ten times as much funding, it came along with hundred times larger expectations which caused the scope to grow a hundredfold equivalently. Tim's fear to meet those expectations caused him to make the game he wanted and knew people expected instead of the one he pitched. Scope grew to include hand-painted art, professional voice overs, orchestral music score, and a much larger team for a longer time so they could make a longer, more polished game. On the first few documentary episodes their struggle to match perceived expectations with the actual budget is clear, and the wishful thinking on estimates and plans also clear in hindsight.
All this because it turns out that, after all, $3M is not a large budget for a triple-A game, specially when you remove kickstarter and amazon's processing fees, rewards costs and shipping, and the costs of the documentary. Consider a team of developers, designers, artists and animators that are needed to build such game, each costing a conservative estimate of US$100k+/year to the company, then add all external assets and services. The burn rate is big for a project on that scope.
All in all, I'm fairly happy on how it turned out so far, and looking forward to part 2. I back independent games on Kickstarter to encourage the shift on the stagnant producer-driven market and don't treat it as a pre-order. Broken Age turned out to be one of the better ones I got (Book of Unwritten Tales 2, Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns were the best ones, Takedown was probably the worst, glad I skipped on Clang).
In fact, I think the documentary alone is worth the $30 I dropped in the pledge. If you haven't seen it, it's available for purchase for $10 and they started releasing episodes publicly for free recently: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd7F6pU2ByRR...
If software development or game design are things that interest you, go see it now, it's very good.
I was one of the backers, and while I got out of at the loop, wasn't there also an issue with Doublefine doing a strategy game (spacebars 9 or something) probably using Broken Age money? (not to mention they sold it on early access on Steam and then decided to just stop developing it since it wasn't profitable for them)
The game you're thinking of was Spacebase DF-9, and I don't think they did use their own funds to develop it. The initial development was funded by investors; you can find press releases bragging about how they them back early using money from people buying the incomplete game on Steam Early Access. Subsequent development was I think intended to be funded entirely by Early Access sales. The reason Double Fine gave for abandoning it was that they weren't making enough money from selling the game to pay the development costs and they didn't want to sink any of their own money in.
Basically, they shifted the risk of the game never being finished from themselves and their investors onto their customers, and their customers got shafted and ended up paying money for a game that was abandoned, unfinished, in a state that was apparently really unfun to play because there just wasn't much to do.
Well, technically they didn't abandon it, but rushed out a "completed" 1.0 a few weeks after some alpha or beta build. It's still being sold as a finished game, I believe.
I haven't played the game, so I can't judge each side merits on the controversy, but it seems to me that a major issue were people expectations of Steam's Early Access model. You are buying an unfinished game, under development, to fund it. It's not a pre-order. It's not a model Double Fine created, they just experimented with it using DF-9.
People seem to expect from this model frequent releases with shiny new content for an indefinite amount of time. The most popular early access games deliver on that, with a release date that never comes and frequent patches that don't necessarily have the goal to finish or polish the game for release but always adding new things.
Failure and the game being cancelled should be an outcome expected from this model, as well as from the Kickstarter model. A game being released that don't meet your expectations is another, and it should be factored in your decision of buying a game that's under early development.
(Full disclosure: am an angry Early Access player)
It's a bit more complicated than that. The biggest outrage doesn't stem from their half-assed "release" (which in itself feels more like an attempt to cash in on a failed project) but from their lack of transparency with regard to the project's funding.
As a consumer the funding appeared to work a bit like this: they got some initial investment to get them to a proof-of-concept demo they could put on Kickstarter; they then raised a large sum of money via crowdfunding on Kickstarter; then they put the game on Steam Early Access for some additional funding to carry the project for the last mile.
Going by the various analyses posted after the cancellation/release, it seems the actual funding worked like this: they secured an initial investment to create a something they could advertise on Kickstarter; they then used the Kickstarter money to pay back the initial investment, effectively putting their balance at zero; then they released the game on Steam Early Access to fully fund the ongoing development of the game; the sales didn't work out as they expected, so they effectively ran out of money and were forced to terminate the project.
So basically from most players' point of view their balance during the Early Access phase looked like this: initial funding + Kickstarter money + Steam sales. But in effect, it actually worked out like this: Kickstarter money - initial funding + Steam sales. The crowdfunding didn't fund the game, it paid back the initial investment. Very few players were aware that Doublefine entirely relied on the monthly Early Access sales numbers to keep the project alive (and that those sales numbers weren't even remotely close to the actual money they burned through at that time).
As for the so-called "release", the game was at alpha stage before it was canned. A lot of the originally planned gameplay hadn't yet been implemented and the features that were already there often suffered from game-breaking bugs. The final update was mostly a last-ditch attempt to weed out some of the bugs and make the game appear less obviously unfinished.
Personally, I think the game is a victim of mismanagement and overconfidence. Doublefine's other games have mostly been extremely successful and well-received. They are known to pay a lot of attention to detail and generally deliver a very polished style. But they treated DF-9 the same despite it being an entirely different genre.
DF-9 was very visually polished from the early Kickstarter onward. Most of its problems are in AI and the simulation aspects of the game. It tried to be a space sim / construction / management game but instead seems to have spent a lot of resources on graphics. This is even more obvious if you compare it with successful crowdfunded games in related genres like Rimworld or Prison Architect. These games have very rudimentary graphics but the actual gameplay (i.e. AI and simulation aspects of the game) was much more powerful at a much earlier stage.
Additionally, the project seems to have been much more expensive. The Early Access sales had to pay for the regular full-time salary of each employee working on the project. This means the project had a very large fixed monthly cost the sales had to cover entirely. Solo developers can try to cut their expenses to accommodate bad sales, established employees need to be able to expect being paid a consistent salary.
DoubleFine is still considered an indie developer. But it's important to understand that it no longer operates like one. It's a business with employees and project teams. Rimworld (Ludeon Studios) is effectively developed by one guy. Prison Architect (Introversion Software) was initially developed mostly by one guy. Minecraft (Mojang) was initially developed by one guy. In each of these cases that one person wasn't an employee assigned to the project by a company that paid him a salary, it was the founder or a co-founder of the company itself. Actual employees (with fixed salaries) would only come into it fairly late into the development (I think Ludeon Studios still is a single person).
I was not aware that DF-9 had been kickstarted. In fact, I looked it up and can't find anything about that - the only games that Double Fine used kickstarter for was Broken Age and Massive Chalice.
What I seem to find is that the first two weeks of sale on Early Access sales paid for the investment [1], which may be what you are thinking about.
Anyway, I agree with your final point - in this model sales must pay for the salary of the team working on the project plus additional development costs, and that's much easier when you are a single indie developer. Double Fine seems to be too big for that.
I still maintain my position that, if you're paying to get in the alpha of a game, you should be prepared if it develops to be of a different genre of what you are expecting, if it focuses on different things, if it's cancelled, or if it's simply bad. You can get frustrated, sure, but not surprised.
I only became aware of DF-9 when it had already been on Steam for a while, so I am basing most of this on what I have heard from those who were there at the start.
The Kickstarter thing seems to be a conflation of the first two weeks on Early Access thing you mentioned and DF having done at least one Kickstarter for an unrelated project in the same timeframe.
Unless I'm very confused, there wasn't any kickstarter for Spacebase DF-9. Just the initial investment and then the early access sales. The first two weeks of the early access sales recouped the $400k investment from Indie Fund and others which makes more sense (it would have been very hard to defend them had they used kickstarter to raise money and give it back to investors).
There was a kickstarter for Massive Chalice but that's a different game.
Okay, that's a pretty reasonable point. Also given that act 1 raised 3 million or so seems like they shouldn't need to dip into sales money to pay for act 2.
Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since).
> But when gradually their companies hired professional management
Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).