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[Kinyou]

Yeeeeaaah, i don't know about these Double Fine guys anymore. First Broken Age, now this? Are they out to shatter all of their goodwill they have created in the past years?

I have this feeling they can't really handle a budget. Or they really overestimated how spacebase would sell

 

[Ozium]

]I have this feeling they can't really handle a budget.[/B] Or they really overestimated how spacebase would sell

Bingo Horrible at time management too.. I thought this was always known about Double Fine, even when Psychonauts was in its heyday.

 

[deadfolk]

Well, this is a dilemma.

I really want to say "well screw them, I won't buy anything else from DF again".

But...Grim Fandango.

 

[old manatee]

Hey that's cool, I was hoping someone would rip me off anyway.

 

[Turin Turambar]

So wait, early access doesn't guarantee that the product will come out? As in finalize?

No.

And how it would work.

Imagine the case of a game where the dev still had to add goals and a main quest... he runs out of money and drops it, saying that instead the game was always intended to be a "sandbox for creative players".

The only way to enforce a finished product would be to first define what features means finished for each game, and then put some "steam police" guys watching every EA development. Impractical.

 

[Moral Panic]

EA is pretty much win-win for developers, they can do whatever they want and owe noone anything. Grab the half finished game, polish the turd, call it 1.0 and bang we're done here.

 

[Turin Turambar]

I don't normally do early access. I did with DF-9 because I loved the concept, and trusted Double Fine. Lesson learned. Assholes.

Now you know what they are also untrusted by publishers! They were right all along! /twist

 

[xptoxyz]

I wonder if after paying the Indie Fund investment, not enough money was coming in to complete development or what happened here. If there was a public target feature set it's a very weird thing to just throw it out to release without those.

 

[FuKuy]

As far as I understand they are releasing a final version. They are releasing a final product so is not halt the development, is finishing it. Of course they could still add more and more features, but if they don't want to... other developers release incomplete games and sell more features and content through DLC, and many people are ok with that....

 

[Turin Turambar]

As far as I understand they are releasing a final version. They are releasing a final product so is not halt the development, is finishing it. Of course they could still add more and more features, but if they don't want to... other developers release incomplete games and sell more features and content through DLC, and many people are ok with that....

Both are true. They aren't incompatible concepts.

They are both halting the development, and because of that, calling what they have right now 1.0 and releasing it as a final product, adding basic stuff like a tutorial to make it and what they can polish in one month of work.

We could discuss what of the two is the cause and what the effect. Given past evidence of features and given their own wording, I think the real cause here is halting development, and the effect then is finishing it.

 

[Randdalf]

The hyberbole in this thread.

They're announcing they finished the game, what's so wrong with that? If they had ambitious plans and the salaries of the 3-4 man team that made this game isn't justified by its sales then it's completely reasonable for them to stop. Writing a list of future plans isn't a "promise" in any way. The same sort of thing happened to Notch when he was making Minecraft, where he would mention a feature of some sort and then suddenly it was a promise, which made some people unreasonably angry when that feature was late to arrive or not added.

As I understand it, the game is quite feature-rich already, and whilst it doesn't have the Dwarf Fortress levels of complexity that they were aiming for originally, it's by no means an unfinished game, which I feel is the implication here. Moreover, the fact they are now releasing the game should be seen as a success for Early Access rather than a failure.

Don't get me started on Broken Age either because that whole thing was blown out of proportion by Kotaku and non-backers, rather than those who had the context of the documentary series.

 

[SeaCarrot]

God dammit. Got burned. Only bought it after the last alpha after thinking it was starting to come along. DF took my moolah and ran, typical. Definitely the last DF game I'll ever purchase purely out of principal.

 

[YianGaruga]

This feels especially shitty after they said this about a month ago after people complained about a lack of updates/communication:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/

Hi,

From an observers point of view I’m worried that I paid for a hit and run on steam and this is now dead. I understand things can get delayed but I remember when I bought this the dev plan was to release an alpha version every month, its now been 2 and a half months since 5, with minor fixes between but that was even a month ago now.

Since then the Dev plan page has been cleared out on the website and theres no updates as to whether anything is even being worked on, this seems to me like a pretty bad indicator that we’re going to see anymore of this. Honestly I wish I hadn’t bought into it, its put me off buying early access games on steam. I just hope our faith in DF wasn’t misplaced, and if they are actually working on it but not releasing anything then they should be updating us more just so we know. It would help dispel all the negative comments on steam as not many people seem to be feeling very positive about it at the moment.

This isn’t intended as a rant, just a concerned customer.

Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally ;____;

What has happened lately on Spacebase is that we’re trying something different with regard to communication. Our hypothesis is that short, regular, relatively low-value updates (things like in-progress screenshots of new UI) don’t really serve much more purpose than telling people “we’re not dead!” The time cost of doing those is pretty small, but our team has been 3-4 people since Alpha 1’s release and I wanted to see what the impact would be - both on our side and on the player side.

I knew there would be threads like this when we undertook this direction, and we’ve been watching the various forums closely. I completely understand how one can read a lack of response as a lack of concern, but nothing could be further from the truth. We come to Double Fine every day and work hard to make Spacebase better. It’s our baby and we love working on it. Some player criticism just isn’t very easy to respond to - we know exactly what’s happening with the project, and we could either give an extended brain dump of all that, or we could try to sum it up and risk misleading through brevity or making some specific promise we can’t keep.

Valve’s talk from Steam Dev Days about communication with fans and Team Fortress 2 got us thinking along this current line. There are some points in it that make a strong kind of counter-intuitive sense: who wouldn’t want constant communication? Well, maybe constant communication helps people care less and less about something over time. We needed to shake things up a bit.

This isn’t some master plan; we’re learning as we go - for example, I recently started updating the in-game Transmission from Team Spacebase to hint at the game’s backstory (aka the Spacebase Lore Minute)... but not many people have commented on it, because (we suspect) most people are paying closer attention to out-of-game communication like the website than launching the game regularly. Which is fine; everything like this we try helps us learn to do better. I’ll probably still keep doing those messages because taking a short break from coding to write weird/funny stuff is just fun, and we know some folks will appreciate it.

Regarding Alpha 6 specifically… hmm, what should I say? When we DO have something to say, you’ll know it! We don’t have Valve’s resources so don’t expect lush animated shorts for each update, but we do have a surprise waiting in the wings for Alpha 6, and you’ll hear about it pretty soon now. We want to tell you a story, we want to make you curious about things. Please be patient for a little while longer. Thanks so much for your continued passion and support.

 

[R1CHO]

The hyberbole in this thread.

They're announcing they finished the game, what's so wrong with that? If they had ambitious plans and the salaries of the 3-4 man team that made this game isn't justified by its sales then it's completely reasonable for them to stop. Writing a list of future plans isn't a "promise" in any way. The same sort of thing happened to Notch when he was making Minecraft, where he would mention a feature of some sort and then suddenly it was a promise, which made some people unreasonably angry when that feature was late to arrive or not added.

As I understand it, the game is quite feature-rich already, and whilst it doesn't have the Dwarf Fortress levels of complexity that they were aiming for originally, it's by no means an unfinished game, which I feel is the implication here. Moreover, the fact they are now releasing the game should be seen as a success for Early Access rather than a failure.

Don't get me started on Broken Age either because that whole thing was blown out of proportion by Kotaku and non-backers, rather than those who had the context of the documentary series.

This feels especially shitty after they said this about a month ago after people complained about a lack of updates/communication:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/

The nerve on this people... And here we have to read people making justifications for them.

Where the fuck is LeBreton now?

 

[teepo]

hyperbole? the game is nowhere near complete

 

[Turin Turambar]

Hell, the mere fact they are releasing the source code of the project the moment they "finish" it, something that they have never done, it's another pointer to the true status: they know they barely got in alpha status, they are washing off their hands from the project, giving the source code so at least some hardcore community guys can continue development if they want.

Which is a nice detail, but as I say, another clue of what it really happened.

 

[Turin Turambar]

Don't get me started on Broken Age either because that whole thing was blown out of proportion by Kotaku and non-backers, rather than those who had the context of the documentary series.

Lol. I'm a backer and don't work in Kotaku, like thousands others, who believe the Broken Age project is another thing that shows they don't have any idea of proper budget and time management skills.

 

[Mozendo]

So wait, early access doesn't guarantee that the product will come out? As in finalize?

Nope, which is why I avoid early access titles.

 

[Unhandled Exception]

I like Double Fine a lot, but they really need to learn their limits. This is not the first sign of an inability to allocate resources properly, and it's likely because they've spread themselves too thin.

 

[Zuhzuhzombie!!]

I don't avoid Early Access titles.

Or Kickstarter.


I just avoid Double Fine.

 

[R1CHO]

Hell, the mere fact they are releasing the source code of the project the moment they "finish" it, something that they have never done, it's another pointer to the true status: they know they barely got in alpha status, they are washing off their hands from the project, giving the source code so at least some hardcore community guys can continue development if they want.

Which is a nice detail, but as I say, another clue of what it really happened.

Their fucking attitude is the worst of all.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/246090/announcements/detail/216494030200824180

No sorry guys we let you down, no we can't continue for budget reasons... We are proud and exited to release 1.0 there you go bye bye.

 

[thefro]

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they expanded the scope of that game, but I don't think it's fair to use that excuse until they actually release it.

They asked money for a small and quick project, they decided to expand it significantly (without any formal consent from the backers) and more than two years later nobody actually knows when it's going to be completed.

I like how in-terms of actual fan input into the game and interactivity with the developers Yacht Club Games has done 100x more with Shovel Knight than Double Fine has with Broken Age, and 1) they didn't even promise that with their Kickstarter, and 2) they're a 5-man team as opposed to the 50 or so that seem to work at DF.

The voice director they hired is the only person who's actually went on the forums and really interacted with people and answered questions.

 

[HariKari]

As I understand it, the game is quite feature-rich already

It's not, and you'd know that if you had actually played it.

 

[Pie and Beans]

Its pretty funny seeing kickstarterers and early accessors getting burned out on Double Fine promises much in the same way most of the games publisher set were too.

Sometimes companies with talent aren't dealt a bad hand, they're just bad at dealing.

 

[old manatee]

It's going to be hilarious to watch what happens when these fly-by-night devs are still hanging out in the morning.

 

[JaseC]

As far as I understand they are releasing a final version. They are releasing a final product so is not halt the development, is finishing it. Of course they could still add more and more features, but if they don't want to... other developers release incomplete games and sell more features and content through DLC, and many people are ok with that....

The dev plans page states in no uncertain terms that v1.0 will be the last major update. Double Fine won't stop working on the game entirely (there will be bugs to fix, after all), but don't expect any new features -- that's precisely why the source code is being released.

 

[Triggerhappytel]

Double Fine are notoriously bad with money/time so this isn't a shock.

Do they have a history of this prior to Broken Age?

 

[CecilRousso]

Well, this is a dilemma.

I really want to say "well screw them, I won't buy anything else from DF again".

But...Grim Fandango.

Why would you feel a need to say something like that? Why the need to go any further then "I want buy anything that isn't complete and that I aren't sure of?" Why do people need to be such drama queens?

 

[Kinyou]

As far as I understand they are releasing a final version. They are releasing a final product so is not halt the development, is finishing it. Of course they could still add more and more features, but if they don't want to... other developers release incomplete games and sell more features and content through DLC, and many people are ok with that....

They jumped from Alpha to full release. That's sort of telling that this was hardly planned.

 

[Newblade]

Hell, the mere fact they are releasing the source code of the project the moment they "finish" it, something that they have never done, it's another pointer to the true status: they know they barely got in alpha status, they are washing off their hands from the project, giving the source code so at least some hardcore community guys can continue development if they want.

Which is a nice detail, but as I say, another clue of what it really happened.

Hack ‘n’ Slash Leaves Early Access, Brings Source Code. And that game didn't underdeliver, did it?

 

[Mikeside]

Well this is pretty shitty.

Doublefine really need to build back trust at this point.

Will only be buying their games when they're complete and I have other people confirming so in the future.

 

[PaulloDEC]

I've logged 39 hours in Spacebase, and while it's sad to see development cease, I feel like I've gotten my money's worth.

Double Fine succeeded in adding a ton of the features from the list posted in the OP (which I should point out appears at a glance to be a list of things that didn't get done, which it isn't) and the result is, if they fix up some of the bugs and balance issues from the latest update, a perfectly playable game. Not as good as it could be perhaps, but still a lot of fun.

 

[Boem]

Hell, the mere fact they are releasing the source code of the project the moment they "finish" it, something that they have never done, it's another pointer to the true status: they know they barely got in alpha status, they are washing off their hands from the project, giving the source code so at least some hardcore community guys can continue development if they want.

Which is a nice detail, but as I say, another clue of what it really happened.

Hack 'n Slash also launched with the source code (which makes complete sense in the context of the game), and that game seems pretty finished (although I haven't completely played through it yet).

There's a lot of hyperbole in this thread, as usual with Double Fine games. It's the same with Broken Age - the documentary (which is absolutely great by the way, funny, well made and very honest) explains their situation very well, but sites like Kotaku continue to pull quotes or facts without context from the episodes which get the gaming community all angry. Broken Age will be finished, even though it's taking longer (which, yes, is a problem with Double Fine, although they are striving for a certain quality while balancing their very limited resources). You can accuse Double Fine of a lot of things, but saying that they don't care about their games or their fans, or that they're swindling people out of money simply isn't true. People underestimate how much time and money goes into software development, and how limited Double Fine's funds are.

Not sure what the story with DF-9 is of course. I have the game, but I've been waiting for the complete product.

 

[R1CHO]

Do they have a history of this prior to Broken Age?

Brutal Legend?

 

[CecilRousso]

Brutal Legend?

It was in publisher hell for quite some time, but I don't recall it being anything with the budget. It was more that Activision first wanted to turn it into a Guitar Hero game, and that EA later on didn't allow it to be marketed as a strategy/action hybrid.

 

[Honey Bunny]

This feels especially shitty after they said this about a month ago after people complained about a lack of updates/communication:

Double Fine is not a random fly-by-night indie dev and we are not going to silently pull the plug on Spacebase or any other in-development project. Doing so would be disastrous for our reputation and it would kill us emotionally ;____;

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/

 

[Turin Turambar]

Hack ‘n’ Slash Leaves Early Access, Brings Source Code. And that game didn't underdeliver, did it?

No idea about how is that game, to be honest. I barely read anything about it. From what I'm reading right now, the game is very short. For the price tag, yeah, some people are saying it undelivered. But as it wasn't very ambitious in the first place it seems their transition to 1.0 hadn't been as polemic.

edit Fukuy, Newblade, Richo, myself... lol this reminds me of another forum...

 

[Maintenance]

This feels especially shitty after they said this about a month ago after people complained about a lack of updates/communication:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/

Hahaha, oh man, that's pure gold.

 

[deadfolk]

Why would you feel a need to say something like that? Why the need to go any further then "I want buy anything that isn't complete and that I aren't sure of?" Why do people need to be such drama queens?

Because I don't want to support a dev that treats paying customers that way? I don't think I'm being a drama queen - I'm not saying "OMG Tim Schaefer is evil and I hope the company collapses".

It's not about not getting burned again - which is what "I want buy anything that isn't complete and that I aren't sure of?" suggests. It's about voting with one's wallet and supporting devs who do right by their customers.

 

[teepo]

 

[SteveWinwood]

its coming out people just dont like where it is feature wise theyre calling finished

dont buy early access if you cant handle the risks

 

[pelican]

I just avoid Double Fine.

Same - completely over-rated in my opinion.

 

[Turin Turambar]

heh.

But seriously, they have lots of projects in development. From a RPS post:

Broken Age
Hack’n'Slash
Spacebase DF-9
Massive Chalice
Grim Fandango
Little Pink Best Buds
Bad Golf 2
Middle Manager of Justice

I think they took the two which were giving them less income (bolded), and "finished" them before they had planned at first, focusing the company in a smaller number of games.

 

[d1rtn4p]

As much as I loved Costume Quest, this news is going to make me wait for impressions on CQ2 now before buying...

 

[Munin]

The irony is that a full game with all the promised features would have sold like gangbusters for months on Steam. Even if it was still in Early Access for a while, showing that you have intentions of completing the game and delivering regular updates, just like Introversion with Prison Architect, can also give you a steady stream of Early Access income.

 

[eot]

Probably wasn't his decision though.

Still sucks for everyone who bought it. Wasn't exactly cheap for an early access game either. This business model is just bad for consumers, as soon as something isn't selling enough it doesn't make sense to keep working on it and those who bought it eat the cost, not the developer.

 

[stump sock]

I got a pretty decent amount of enjoyment out of what is already out there. It was severely lacking an endgame, but oh well.

I don't know, you accept the risks when you do kickstarters or early access. I'm not sure it's worth getting angry about, but disappointment is understandable.

 

[Cels]

This feels especially shitty after they said this about a month ago after people complained about a lack of updates/communication:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/14641/

looking back at this it's hard not to suspect that they were already planning to release the game in its current state and call it a day

tough to know either way but i know some people won't give them the benefit of the doubt

 

[Haunted]

Probably related to who is running the project, making sure they hit milestones on time, avoiding feature creep, etc.

Poor JP

 

[CecilRousso]

heh.

But seriously, they have lots of projects in development. From a RPS post:

Broken Age
Hack’n'Slash
Spacebase DF-9
Massive Chalice
Grim Fandango
Little Pink Best Buds
Bad Golf 2
Middle Manager of Justice

Little Pink Best Buds? Bad Golf 2? Thos aren't in development are they? The first one was only a two weeks prototype that was never an official product, and Bad Golf 2 is a fan game that they aren't developing.

Hack&Slash is complete and released, and Middle Manager of Justice was released a long long time ago.