Remember Broken Age? You know – the Double Fine adventure that was on Kickstarter, and asked for $400,000, and got $3.3 million, and – to some extent – kickstarted the games-on-Kickstarter revolution? Yeaaaah, well, apparently the $3.3 million wasn’t actually enough for the game they now have in mind.
According to the latest Kickstarter update, internal estimates reckoned that – at the scope they currently have – the full game wouldn’t be done until 2015 and they simply don’t have the funding for that, to the extent that they’d apparently have to cut the game down by 75% just to get it done in a timeframe they could afford. Which, obviously, was not a particularly great option. As Tim Schafer put it: “I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it’s hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle.”
However, they’re not keen on most of the obvious options. Publishers are a no-no. Going back to Kickstarter “seemed wrong.” The solution, then, is apparently to go for Steam Early Access.
The new plan is to have Act One of Broken Age hit Steam Early Access in January 2014, and use the money raised from that to fund the polishing of Act Two, which would come in a free update sometime around April/May. The theory goes that everyone gets to play the game sooner, it doesn’t have to be drastically cut down, and backers still get the entire game.
Schafer also noted that backers will still get beta access prior to the game going onto Steam Early Access, and went onto Twitter to point out that “Double Fine is NOT asking for more money. We are fine, financially. We are using our OWN money to deliver a bigger game than we Kickstarted.” Which is fair enough, although it still smacks a bit of poor planning.
If you want to help out, then you can either wait for Early Access and pick it up then, or become a Slacker Backer and get lots of little bonuses.
