In the final installment of Double Fine’s Broken Age developer diary, Founder Tim Schafer shed some light on the cost of the game’s development compared to the funding it raised via Broken Age‘s Kickstarter campaign. Schafer reveals that the game was a lot more expensive to create than the $3.3 million it raised via crowdfunding. As a result, Double Fine had to adjust its expectations and predicted that the game won’t be profitable.
My expectation with Broken Age in the end was just to break even. With Kickstarter, the risk is gone of losing money on it, so you know you’ve broken even if you just make the game to that amount of money. But we made it [for], like, twice as much almost as we got in. Or more. So we will just about make that back.
That said, Schafer believes that the Kickstarter campaign was a success, and that crowdfunding is “here to stay.” He also said that he hopes crowdfunding will grow enough to fund AAA games going forward. As far as publishers are concerned, Schafer said that crowdfunding helped to prevent Double Fine from depending on publishers.
The biggest change is that we don’t need the publishers anymore 100 percent. It used to be there was no money in the world outside of publishers.
So now when we’re talking to a publisher, the deals are better. We’re asking for less money, but we’re also not entirely dependent on them to make payroll next week. We’re not like, ‘Please, we’ll sign anything, we just got to make payroll. OK, you get to kick us in the teeth once a month and all this stuff.’ Now we only have to take good deals with people we like.
Broken Age is now available as a complete package, featuring both Act 1 and 2. You can read our review of the game here.
[Source: Double Fine (YouTube)]
