
Double Fine raises $1m in less than 24hrs on Kickstarter - pkrumins
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure?1m
======
_frog
I think Rock, Paper, Shotgun made a good observation in their article on
this[1]:

> And it’s impossible not to observe that on a day when gamers give a million
> dollars for a game that doesn’t yet exist, Ubisoft’s customers couldn’t play
> games they’d paid for and received.

The old model of publishers having excessive power over game developers can't
die quick enough.

[1]: [http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/09/double-fine-
kicks...](http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/09/double-fine-kickstarter/)

~~~
electromagnetic
Yes but consider this is Tim Schafer. I see his name on a product, 99% of the
time I'm going to pay. I saw Trenched on xbox arcade and bought it
immediately, whilst any other game it'll be 2 weeks or more before I buy it
even though I have the points to get rid of.

Similarly I see a John Scalzi or Terry Pratchett book and its bought, no
thinking necessary. Again, if I see Futurama on TV it's going to be on.

Would I pay $20 in advance to get this? Yes, I pre-order shit regularly. Would
I pay it 6 months in advance? Meh probably.

~~~
malvim
I think that's exactly the point. People want to buy stuff from whoever they
like. This is the same as the Louis CK show. I like these guys, they're
releasing something new, I'll pay (and wait for it if needed).

Whether or not this would work for indie/unknown developers is a whole other
story, I think. The main point is direct funding.

~~~
jonnathanson
_"Whether or not this would work for indie/unknown developers is a whole other
story, I think."_

I agree that the jury's still out for the little guy, but I'd argue that the
little guy simply needs to hustle that much harder to get noticed.

In theory, there's little reason why a compelling-looking presentation about a
video game, from a relative unknown, wouldn't catch fire if marketed
correctly. Look at the Elevation Dock, for instance. Different category
altogether, but the video demonstrates the appeal of the product, the thought
that went into its design, _and_ the personality of its creator (unknown to
the general public prior to the Kickstarter project).

A "Startup Tim Schafer" would need to be his (or her) own marketing team. He'd
want to -- probably need to -- crack the top Kickstarter listings, and
hopefully earn some press pickup, by making an undeniably killer presentation.
And he'd need to make damned sure to ship something in the end. (While it's
true that Kickstarter isn't _technically_ a pre-sales site, a lot of users
seem to treat it that way. If you're an upstart developer with no AAA track
record, your Kickstarter launch _is_ your track record; you'll have a razor-
thin margin of error).

No doubt Tim Schafer has a lot of advantages over Startup Tim Schafer. But the
hill isn't impossible for Startup Tim to climb. If anything, I think the
existence of Kickstarter makes things a lot easier for him. Kickstarter can be
an excellent marketing tool every bit as much as it's a funding tool.

------
_delirium
Although impressive, this still doesn't include the difficult bootstrapping
step. What this example, along with Louis CK, Trent Reznor, and Radiohead
show, is that if you're already famous via traditional means, then you can
crowdsource enough money for your 3rd, 4th, or 8th production to go indie. But
how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the
"traditional" media industry?

In fact if you _are_ well-known, it's not clear you even need Kickstarter at
all. Einstürzende Neubauten, a niche-well-known industrial band, raised a
substantial amount of money just by adding a subscription feature on their
website in 2002, for example.

~~~
angrycoder
> But how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the
> "traditional" media industry?

You work for free or very little money either by having a day job or living
the life of a starving artist. Nobody is going to fund your first game,
because your first game is going to be terrible. Heck, your first half dozen
games are probably going to be terrible. People like to think of guys like
Notch (Minecraft) or Edmund Mcmillen (Super Meat Boy) as overnight successes,
but they made games for a long time before they made it big. If you are lucky,
you can scrape enough together in your early career to pay your rent and eat.
Heck even the legendary John Carmack was making little games for Softdisk then
the commander keen games before id struck gold with Wolfenstien and Doom.

~~~
_delirium
Fwiw, the Edmund Mcmillen example isn't really accurate; he made a
considerable amount of money from his previous game, the IGF-award-winner
Gish, that he co-developed with Alex Austin and Josiah Pisciotta. Super Meat
Boy was his follow-up.

~~~
angrycoder
Gish only made sales of $120k[1]. Edwin worked with a publisher and as you
mentioned worked with other people, so I don't think he made a considerable
amount of money there. In interviews and podcasts he frequently mentions being
'poor' for a long time while making games.

Even disregarding all that, he was making games before he made Gish, so the
example still holds.

My point was, nobody is going to pay you while you practice, unless you get a
job with BigCorp as part of a team and work your way up.

[1][http://www.gameproducer.net/2007/05/09/sales-stats-
gish-1210...](http://www.gameproducer.net/2007/05/09/sales-stats-
gish-121000-sales/)

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MrFoof
Is this the first case of something getting significantly funded on KickStart
with nothing to show other than a promise?

As others have mentioned... Tim Schafer (and Ron Gilbert) have a hell of a
track record. They have an incredibly loyal fan base, and a series of past
successes. The reason why Tim Schafer was able to raise $1M in less than 24
hours was because A) he's Tim of Legend and B) there is a market hungry for
adventure games like the ones Tim and Ron made.

Markus Perrson (Notch) had something tangible to show and for people to play
before he started accepting payments for Minecraft. He was effectively a
nobody in the industry, but he had something playable.

Even Tarn Adams (Toady One) had releases of Dwarf Fortress before he accepted
and attempted to live off of donations. Again, a nobody in the industry, but
he had something playable.

No Time to Explain? Had a flash game before they did a KickStarter project.

Project Zomboid? They had demo videos to show.

It's something I used to tell my boss -- quit trying to sell stuff to
customers you refuse to let any of us developers start actual work on. Let us
build a good prototype _then_ let's go sell it.

\-----

Is this a first? Can anyone show an example where there was funding behind
something that didn't even have anything to show?

~~~
JonLim
Color.

Ha ha ha, I slay myself.

But in seriousness, I threw my money into the ring because I have really
craved a solid adventure game. I know these guys will take a solid crack at
it, and at the very least, I will get to watch the game development process
unfold on a very personal and intimate level.

$15 seems like a low price to watch an adventure game's development process,
AND get the end result.

------
solac3
They have raised over 11 dollars per second since lunching the kickstarter.

I can't imagine a game studio that deserves it more than Double fine, they are
going to make the best adventure game ever made.

~~~
vannevar
I'm not so sure. A big budget and high expectations can sandbag even the best
creative team.

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lhnz
It's not over yet.

Anybody want to take a wild guess on what their funding will be after 30 days
of quieter exposure?

~~~
tomkinstinch
What would a realistic cost be for a game like the one they are proposing?

Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably
enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists,
musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising,
etc.

~~~
mrcharles
Well, they said it would be a small team of 6-7 people, and their aim is to
finish for October. With that math, we're looking at those devs being paid
around 70k a year, give or take. Which is probably about right.

I'm not sure how taxes affect the money raised from Kickstarter -- but I
assume the plan from Double Fine was to get a bunch of the money from the
internet, and then throw in a bit of their own.

As for creating an adventure game, it's not a very large technical challenge,
for the most part. 7-8 quality devs for 8 months? I can believe they could
bust out an adventure game, at a low fidelity art style.

The biggest costs to an adventure game would be asset creation. Drawing
everything, or modelling everything. That's where the money will go primarily.

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_sentient
It's pretty amazing how we just had an article on HN about how the kickstarter
fundraising record was about to be broken, and then Double Fine comes along
and obliterates the previous record in under 24 hours.

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1qaz2wsx3edc
I wonder how much awareness was raised by Notch mentioning Psychonauts days
earlier.

The timing was perfect for Double Fine, it's all pretty amazing.

I hope Kickstarter has giant cheques.

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sparkygoblue
This will be my first kickstarter contribution. I'm a huge fan of Grim
Fandango, and I can't wait to see what they come up with.

~~~
mitsche
Grim Fandango was the most immersive and epic experience I've ever had while
playing a video game.

Full Throttle comes very close.

I don't play video games much these days, but I think it's safe to say that
Tim Schafer is one of the best writers in the industry. Maybe that doesn't
mean much, but God do I love his characters!

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rjurney
This is an important event in the democratization of venture funding. Y
Combinator and other incubators are making startup funding as efficient as a
traditional bank loan. Kickstarter funding products is another step forward.

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ChrisNorstrom
Did they advertise this long before they launched on KickStarter? How did
people find out so quickly otherwise?

I launched a kickstarter campaign myself and I'm doing terribly. I look around
and see all sorts of weird campaigns getting funded and can't help but think:
What am I doing wrong? People in real life tell me they like my product, yet
on kickstarter it's going no where. So I guess it's safe to assume, they
either lied to me and my product is undesirable, no one knows about my
campaign despite me trying to get featured on design blogs, or I'm so
repulsively ugly in my video that I drive people away.

~~~
citricsquid
Power of the internet my friend, they did not advertise it at all until the
project was live, there was no coverage of the impending launch besides Tim
said on Twitter "big announcement coming" an hour before.

Can you link us to your product? Kickstarter is some part luck and a large
part making something people want.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
_Power of the internet my friend_

Come on, is that really a helpful comment? It's not like he posted his project
on the "non-internet" Kickstarter and that's why it's doing poorly.

I would imagine Kickstarter success comes with fame and marketing. If you're
famous, all it takes is a tweet. If not, you'll have to work hard at getting
the word out and hope that maybe someone else famous will take notice.

------
ekianjo
Next step: let's have Yu Suzuki put ShenMue 3 as a project on Kickstarter so
that they can start funding the game. It may be the best opportunity ever to
get the game done.

~~~
psykotic
The production costs for the first Shenmue game were in the neighborhood of 50
million dollars, which made it the most expensive video game at the time. A
worthy sequel would take a lot of money to get made. I'd rather the series
stay buried than be botched. Let's all be thankful that cheap Shenmue MMO
cash-in never saw the light of day.

~~~
ekianjo
Well, the cost of the original ShenMue was huge because there were a number of
R&D efforts going into it. There were no middleware engines at that time,
everything had to be created from scratch (remember that development started
on the Saturn, not the Dreamcast) so I would not take the first figure as a
reliable benchmark for a production of this magnitude in 2010s. There are many
complex games being made those days with much lower budgets (rather in the
10-20 millions range), a testament to productivity increase over time. 3D
asset creation has gone a long way since 1997-1998.

I doubt a Kickstarter effort would be a silver bullet to get the game funded
in its entirety, but it could well be a good place to start from and then have
other partners (publishers or other investors) jump in to help fund the rest
later on while work goes on.

I believe the goal of such a crowdsourcing effort for ShenMue 3 would also be
to assess the market size for such a sequel. Honestly, no big publisher is
going to bet on ShenMue and pour money in it. They are too risk-adverse. If it
were the happen, the community, the fans would have to lead the way.

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aorshan
Absolutely incredible. Just shows how helpful Kickstarter can be. Although
they did benefit from some strong media coverage and having significant name
recognition, $1 million is still ridiculous. I am also really impressed by how
many donations there were at the highest pay brackets.

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BHSPitMonkey
I'm really interested in seeing conclusions drawn later on about the effect of
this kind of preemptive crowd-based funding on the developers themselves and
their process. Obviously there is a difference in state of mind between a team
working on a game with nothing but hopes and anxieties that their game will be
well-received and sell, versus a team whose customers have paid them _before
development has even started_.

The big question, of course, is how the team will handle it. Maybe they'll
become overconfident, or feel less motivated to succeed than otherwise. Or, on
the other hand, maybe they'll feel unpressured and able to exercise creativity
more freely and naturally without those worries.

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reidmain
It will be interesting to see how the extra money affects the game. They said
they are going to inject all of it into development but since they want this
to be out by October-ish they are going to have to cut scope eventually.

I honestly hope they bump out the date like six months and go bigger rather
than getting it done for October and then using the extra cash to do things
like porting the game to other platforms.

Hell reaching 5 million is not out of the question and that could keep a team
of 10-15 people employed for two years at the minimum. They could reach a
point where they literally can't spent money fast enough if they actually want
to make this game with small team.

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utan
Kickstarter is making a killing!

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mwerty
I've never heard of this guy though I played full throttle back in the day.
What were his channels for making this known? Was it only on
<http://www.doublefine.com/>?

~~~
Trexoton
He's a big name in gaming, and probably reached out to a lot of people through
gaming press which in turn follow his twitter account. Let's not forget this
isn't just Tim Schafers company, I think Ron Gilbert has a lot of pull as
well. And Double Fine is a well-rounded developer with a solid dedicated user
base.

------
Sembiance
Kickstarter will take 5% of that and Amazon another 2.9%. Still, that's likely
a lot less than a publisher would take :)

