On January 28, Double Fine's point-and-click adventure Broken Age leaves the hands of backers and hits general availability on Steam. It's a big moment for Double Fine and for Kickstarter. They came through. They delivered, and they did it in a new way--working with the fans, and for the fans, to make the game they wanted. And there could be more Kickstarters in Double Fine's future.
"I used to feel like we couldn't do a second one. It's called Kickstarter, not Kickforever," Double Fine Big Boss Tim Schafer said when he joined us on the PC Gamer podcast on Friday . "But it doesn't have to be limited to that."
Schafer talked about the development of Broken Age, the history of adventure games, how Kickstarter has changed game publishing, and why the funding model doesn't need to be a one-time thing.
"If we make a bunch of money off these games, and we can make our next money with that money, then we're off. But we only Kickstarted one of our four teams, and now we've done two of our teams [with Massive Chalice ]. And the other two teams are being funded from Indiefund investment. So I feel like just on that basis we could do two more Kickstarters just to get those teams up and running.
"This is an adventure game. It might not make that much money, and we've invested a lot of our money into it, so it might just break even. We may not have 3.3 million dollars left over to make our next game ourselves. So I think, yeah, we could Kickstart that. I think people will hopefully begin to realize what Kickstarter is, and how they're much better off if we're funding our next game that way. We're much more likely to be able to make something that is what they want, because we're making the things that we like to make."
