5 replies to this topic

[fireside]

Tim Schaeffer, head of Doublefine, decided to get funding for a new point and click adventure on Kickstarter. Because he's well known and been involved in games like Day of the Tentacle, Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, and others, they've already reached over a million dollars. The goal was 400,000, which they made in 2 days. With a $15.00 donation, one can download the game when it's finished, so it's sort of like a pre-order. I've seen articles on it around the web, like Ars Technica.

[Sol_HSA]

Uh, they didn't make it in "two days", they crossed the $400k in under 8 hours.

As of right now, they've passed $1.2M.

Here's the link you forgot:
http://www.kickstart...0809/1929840910

[TheNut]

I'm surprised they pulled that off. By their numbers, an average of $36 was contributed by each supporter. Probabilistically, I'm sure some gave $10 or $20, which leaves others giving well over $50 to compensate. Kudos to them for raising such funding, although their team photo has quite a lot of bodies. Dividing up a mill between them is stretching funds thin.

[fireside]

Thanks, Sol, I should have posted that.

Quote

I'm sure some gave $10 or $20, which leaves others giving well over $50 to compensate.

They have some stats on Sol's link:
Someone gave 10,000 for a lunch with Ron Gilbert and Tim Schaeffer. I think they're nice guys and did some awesome games, but ...

I think it proves that adventure games aren't quite dead yet. There just isn't enough profit to satisfy publishers.

Everyone is testing new business models with digital distribution, the internet, etc. It should lead to some better choices for small to medium productions. I don't even know how Kickstarter, works, actually. Is it simply a donation, or a loan?

[Reedbeta]

It's a donation, but the payments only go through if the project reaches its funding goal. If it doesn't reach the goal, none of the donors pay anything. In this case they've already trebled their goal and are still going.

[TheNut]

fireside said:

I think it proves that adventure games aren't quite dead yet.

Young gamers like to shoot things, old gamers like to think through things There was an interesting article I read on gamasutra about how adventure style games like the Myth genre is a dying breed in North America. There's a cult following, but it's nowhere near the numbers it used to be back in the 90s. However, what was interesting about the article was that it claimed Europeans and Asians crave adventure games, particularly Japan. Apparently interactive novels are quite common over there.

I actually miss adventure games. Myth was fun, as was Maniac Mansion, Police Quest, and Space Quest. Pretty much any game made by Sierra was A+. Ah man, nostalgia is kicking in