A few weeks ago I was finally able to play Broken Age for a little bit, and I thought I wanted to explain the story, since we're rather proud to have participated in it :)
For those of you who do not know, Double Fine is a games development company created by Tim Schafer. Tim was one of the people working in LucasArts when they developed some of the greatest graphic adventures ever created, and he did or participated in most of them. However, one of the last games, Grim Fandango, didn't do good in sales. This, accompanied by other great graphic adventures that failed to produce money, caused big studios to abandon this format of gaming.
After Grim Fandango, Tim went to create Double Fine, and they produced a number of games. Their first one was Psychonauts, another great game (this time a platformer) that did not do so well on sales at the beginning and did not help the company in stabilizing its situation.
The next game they developed was Brütal Legend. However, during its development, their publisher (Activision) decided that they wanted a different game, and when the studio declined to change it, Activision dropped them. The studio managed to make an agreement with EA to publish the game instead, but then Activision filled a lawsuit claiming that they had invested in the game and were still interested. Things eventually got resolved, but the studio suffered from it, and the game didn't have all the content it originally should have, and became quite shorter. It still is a pretty good game. The gameplay is a little bit lacking, but the story, cast and atmosphere are really awesome.
After this incident, Double Fine was in a precarious situation, lacking money and low on morale. They managed to stay afloat by releasing some smaller games produced with the same engine used in Brütal Legend. In this situation, they remembered that fans constantly were asking them to do one graphic adventure like the ones in the past. Big companies said that this was no longer profitable, and therefore no one wanted to invest on them...but with the internet, there were alternative ways of financing such a project.
Kickstarter is a website that lets you donate money to projects you believe are worth doing and that lack funding. At the time when Double Fine was considering its future, Kickstarter had done some small campaigns, with only one or two very successful ones.
Double Fine decided to make their fans prove what they were saying and proposed to fund a new graphic adventure, using this video to promote the bid. The initial bid was 400.000 dollars, which is quite a big sum, of course...
For some weird reason, I managed to find out about this the same day that they put this video up. I got really excited about this, and I went to check the Kickstarter page. I wanted to donate money so a small, great game company could basically do whatever they wanted with no publishers messing around the final product.
When I entered the page, donations had reached 800.000 dollars. The 400.000-mark had been crushed in less than 8 hours. The Kickstarter server was crashing and didn't handle the load well. In the middle of this, I managed to make a small donation. I explained the story to Olia, and she got excited about it as well, and we started to check the page and refresh to see what was happening. In a few minutes thousands of dollars were being donated to the project. Everybody was crazy about it, the comments of the people participating were awesome, and checking twitter accounts of people from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, they couldn't believe it either.
We actually saw it arrive to 1.000.000 dollars. It was amazing, and less than 24 hours had passed. It felt like a special moment of partying with the world.
After this, the rhythm of donations slowed down, and days passed without big donations. However, in the month that the campaign lasted, they managed to get 3.3 Millions.
I forgot about this for a long time, and after I while I read that even with that money they had production problems, because they made the game way too big. In the end they divided the game in two, and decided to sell the first part and then produce the second part (that would not require another purchase).
The game came out just recently, and since I was a backer, I had the right to get a copy. I didn't install it in a long while, but some weeks ago we finally tried the game that we helped a little bit to make.
We haven't played much, for obvious reasons....but we can already tell: Broken Age is awesome. The animation, the drawings, the voice acting, the music, the little details...it's incredible, it feels like playing inside of a painting.
What remains to be seen is if the plot and the puzzles are also top notch since we haven't played much....but so far the feelings we're getting are pretty good.
The most important thing about all that is that it has shown that publishers can be very, very wrong about their opinions. Sure, publishers know a number of tricks that increases your chances of being economically successful, and they may correctly guess that some projects will fail...but this is not an exact science. Publishers are also usually ruled by rich people with very fixed ways of thinking that prevents innovations, or just adapting to new times. And now there's lots of chances to make something awesome and popular, that innovates in things that nobody has dared to try, and we're free to put such ideas to popular vote in form of donations.
Anyway, Broken age seems like a great game, and supporting it guarantees that Double Fine will keep producing imaginative, incredible games.
Kickstarter is a website that lets you donate money to projects you believe are worth doing and that lack funding. At the time when Double Fine was considering its future, Kickstarter had done some small campaigns, with only one or two very successful ones.
Double Fine decided to make their fans prove what they were saying and proposed to fund a new graphic adventure, using this video to promote the bid. The initial bid was 400.000 dollars, which is quite a big sum, of course...
For some weird reason, I managed to find out about this the same day that they put this video up. I got really excited about this, and I went to check the Kickstarter page. I wanted to donate money so a small, great game company could basically do whatever they wanted with no publishers messing around the final product.
When I entered the page, donations had reached 800.000 dollars. The 400.000-mark had been crushed in less than 8 hours. The Kickstarter server was crashing and didn't handle the load well. In the middle of this, I managed to make a small donation. I explained the story to Olia, and she got excited about it as well, and we started to check the page and refresh to see what was happening. In a few minutes thousands of dollars were being donated to the project. Everybody was crazy about it, the comments of the people participating were awesome, and checking twitter accounts of people from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, they couldn't believe it either.
We actually saw it arrive to 1.000.000 dollars. It was amazing, and less than 24 hours had passed. It felt like a special moment of partying with the world.
After this, the rhythm of donations slowed down, and days passed without big donations. However, in the month that the campaign lasted, they managed to get 3.3 Millions.
I forgot about this for a long time, and after I while I read that even with that money they had production problems, because they made the game way too big. In the end they divided the game in two, and decided to sell the first part and then produce the second part (that would not require another purchase).
The game came out just recently, and since I was a backer, I had the right to get a copy. I didn't install it in a long while, but some weeks ago we finally tried the game that we helped a little bit to make.
We haven't played much, for obvious reasons....but we can already tell: Broken Age is awesome. The animation, the drawings, the voice acting, the music, the little details...it's incredible, it feels like playing inside of a painting.
What remains to be seen is if the plot and the puzzles are also top notch since we haven't played much....but so far the feelings we're getting are pretty good.
The most important thing about all that is that it has shown that publishers can be very, very wrong about their opinions. Sure, publishers know a number of tricks that increases your chances of being economically successful, and they may correctly guess that some projects will fail...but this is not an exact science. Publishers are also usually ruled by rich people with very fixed ways of thinking that prevents innovations, or just adapting to new times. And now there's lots of chances to make something awesome and popular, that innovates in things that nobody has dared to try, and we're free to put such ideas to popular vote in form of donations.
Anyway, Broken age seems like a great game, and supporting it guarantees that Double Fine will keep producing imaginative, incredible games.
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