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Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

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Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#31

Post by Macsenour »

psykotic wrote: post #26
forrestthewoods wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasteland 2 being successful is far more impressive to me than Double Fine Adventure. DFA was a perfect storm. Amazing and funny front man in Tim Shafer. A proven studio that has released multiple games of similar small scope in recent years. Plus a pair of guys (Tim + Ron Gilbert) who practically invented the genre in the early 90s. Amazing, awesome, and wonderful that they were so successful but not necessarily a s…

> A game that came out in 1988 and only ever sold 100k units (plus lord knows how many pirated copies). In those days 100,000 units sold meant a big hit. The original sales numbers for Secret of Monkey Island were in that neighborhood.

My first game for the Commodore 64, a port, sold 18,000 copies. It was considered a big hit at that time, 1983.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#32

Post by delackner »

Happy to see they put some of the extra money to adding Mac support. I wish I saw that news before the window closed, since I ignored the project on first hearing about it because they were going windows-only.

Now I see that the Wasteland 2 project also says it is Windows only, but "Maybe" they will add mac compatibility if they get 1.5mil.

This suggests that Kickstarter needs a new feature: Pledges that are conditional not just on the project succeeding, but pledges that are conditional on the project exceeding successive tiers of ambition.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#33

Post by bermanoid »

sirclueless wrote: post #19
kennywinker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the recent crowdfunding bill obama just signed, I hope to see a kickstarter-like site that offers equity instead of "rewards". There are lots of businesses that don't work well as kickstarters, but could work with an equity model.

Even so, I have my doubts that mob mentality and viral marketing will prove to be reliable diviners of good investments. That said, they may be every bit as good as say, a gated community of silicon valley entrepreneurs and angel investors. After all, in a sort of perverse coincidence, these people purport to predict mob mentality and viral potential. Maybe crowd-funding is just trading the experience and insider kno…

The main thing crowd-funding has over big investors is that rather than having to predict what the mob will be interested in, the mob can be part of the investment process.

Sure, they might not be as good at judging potential to execute as a seasoned team of investors, but they'll be a lot better at gauging interest levels.

I also wouldn't underestimate the potential of having a lot of tiny investors becoming product evangelists; if you've got a thousand people putting $50 apiece into a project, that's not only a thousand first users, it's also a thousand real people that will happily post links to Facebook, mention the product in a blog, recommend it to their friends, etc. Especially because they presumably were interested in it in the first place.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#34

Post by Ralith »

jstevens85 wrote: post #17
3lit3H4ck3r wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome stuff! Truly a great day for the project, Kickstarter and the internet overall. Not only traditional publishers trembling, but their establishment middlemen financiers...only place to go from here is up with any single inventor or team with a concept that can catch the eye of the funding crowd!

Traditional publishers trembling? That would seem unlikely to me given that one of the legends of the game development community only managed to raise a budget equivalent to an average XBLA game.

An average XBLA game makes millions?

I need to change careers.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#35

Post by gurkendoktor »

jerf wrote: post #21

A periodic topic that has come up on HN in the past few weeks is how people can make money in a non-copyright world. A common example brought up is the commission model, where payment is made in advance, but I think people subconsciously discard it as a real possibility because they can't imagine how it could actually happen. Here it is. Yes, Double Fine (and Brian Fargo with the Wasteland 2) come in with a pre-exist…

> but I think people subconsciously discard it as a real possibility because they can't imagine how it could actually happen

Or because it clearly gives power and responsibilities to the consumer. If the game sucks, I will still have paid for it. The role of the investor suddenly was forced onto me as a consumer, and I really don't want to have to do that. Going through kickstarter and reading up on each person's credentials is not worth my time, I'd rather have a third party do that (and they will only do it if they have Copyright to protect their guesses.)

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#37

Post by ido »

Ralith wrote: post #34
jstevens85 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional publishers trembling? That would seem unlikely to me given that one of the legends of the game development community only managed to raise a budget equivalent to an average XBLA game.

An average XBLA game makes millions? I need to change careers.

He was talking about budget, not profits. I don't know about average but I wouldn't be surprised if quite a bit of XBLA/PSN (not XBLIG) are made at around that budget point (AAA games on the other hand commonly have budgets in the 10s of millions, some ever more).

The common XBLA game probably loses money.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#38

Post by wccrawford »

delackner wrote: post #32

Happy to see they put some of the extra money to adding Mac support. I wish I saw that news before the window closed, since I ignored the project on first hearing about it because they were going windows-only. Now I see that the Wasteland 2 project also says it is Windows only, but "Maybe" they will add mac compatibility if they get 1.5mil. This suggests that Kickstarter needs a new feature: Pledges that are conditio…

I think Kickstarter will start to add more features like that, now that these giant successes have started. Previously, the money was so low that it wasn't really worth doing things like that.

Re: Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter finishes at $3,335,250

#40

Post by wccrawford »

brianobush wrote: post #27

seems like the idea of platform for funding ideas (kickstarter) has proved itself as a valid idea.

I think it's a bit early to decide that. DoubleFine Adventure and Wasteland 2 are really big hits with the fans, and this is the first time this has happened. There's a lot of emotion involved here.

If this were new IP and/or new devs, it wouldn't be nearly so crazy.

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it's not going to be a free ride in the future just because these 2 groups did it. They're going to have to work hard for it... Probably a lot harder than these 2 projects did.

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