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Double Fine loses a project, and lays off 12 staff
- Thread starter Parham
- Start date
CecilRousso
Member
People are actually trying to call incompetence on the guys who have kept an independent developer going for 14 years, and still employ 40+ people? That's just dumb.
Because you need projects to keep people employed. If they worked on 1 project, they would have to let further people go.
It wouldn't suprise me if they did, and if they do that after delivering Broken Age and Massive Chalice, then why not?
Because you need projects to keep people employed. If they worked on 1 project, they would have to let further people go.
It wouldn't suprise me if they did, and if they do that after delivering Broken Age and Massive Chalice, then why not?
They stumble constantly because of their overhead. Over staffed and living in the bay area = expensive.
They are not incompetent their management is bad. Broken Age was funded almost 3 years ago and game is not finished. DF-9 will never be finished by them, they had huge issues with publishers before because they can't manage project and they are missing deadlines and budget.
MastaKilla
Member
Just give me Grim Fandango please, that's day 1 for me. Just finish that please!!
But this wasn't purely Double Fine's fault. The publisher of one of their projects pulled the funding.
charlequin
Banned
Because if they work on three projects at once, they have to lay people off?
I'm not sure what exactly people think "refocusing" or whatever would mean here. They have to lay people off here because their inbound cash flow only pays for so many employees. It's not like there's stacks of money lying around to move those employees onto one of their other projects.
The whole thing about Double Fine is that they're a mid-sized studio in an industry where mid-sized studios aren't really a thing anymore, because you have to run them on near-zero margin and they're incredibly dependent on mercurial sources of funding to keep their doors open. They can't even get the funding to consistently keep these smaller projects going; there's no way they could possibly get funding for projects with way more employees and budget attached.
Not really anything to do about that at this point. They were founded here back when prices were crashing left and right thanks to the dot com bubble bursting. It's not like they're Ubisoft or some other massive conglomerate that can treat all its employees like faceless drones; they can't just pack up and move their whole staff somewhere else.
Do you work at Double Fine?
Except financial incompetency and management incompetency are closely related. If management makes poor staffing, project planning and project management decisions, they will end up not utilizing resources the most efficiently.
If they are over ambitious for the amount of money they have, that is bad mgmt. and planning. If they overhire, that is bad project mgmt.. etc.
They are too closely related.
The fact is DF has never produced a "HIT" game. They have had some moderately "successful" games but their revenue stream is likely nothing to write home about.
The two most obvious examples of DF projects show this is a company that has issues at all levels of mgmt. - the game project side and the money mgmt. side.
Honestly for any publisher DF would be a risky business partner. They really have not delivered a great game that attracts media attention or sales and do not inspire confidence.
People really REALLY need to separate "Double Fine' from "Tim Schaeffer, ex of LucasArts, creator of Psychonauts/Grim Fandango/etc."
CecilRousso
Member
Would buy.
Double Fine IS Tim Schafer's company whether you like it or not.
Psychonauts IS a Double Fine production by the way.
Psychonauts, Brutal Legend and Broken Age are all written by the same person : Tim Schafer.
IIRC, the best selling Schafer's product at Lucas Arts was Full Throttle, and we're talking about 1M sales. Which isn't even that great for a successfull PC game in the late 90's. Grim Fandango wasn't a success at all. It's cult today sure, but it didn't sold very much.
You shouldn't be making a "hit games" for your company to survive, there's room for more.
I think right now Double Fine faces two problem : most of the employees are senior, which means they cost a lot & DF is located in the Bay Area which is probably the last place you want to go if you're short on money.
But I strongly believe that you can run a 40ppl studio working on several projects at all time and be able to survive without having a game selling millions. It's just more complicated when you have to find 10.000$ / person / month because of the place you live in.
I hope all of the affected people will land on their feet quickly. It's always a shame when stuff like this happens.
However, it kind of does feel like Double Fine is losing a lot of its goodwill in the community lately. The DF-9 debacle was the low point, but Broken Age not being what a lot of people hoped for and taking ages to complete is not helping either. I hope the team is able to stop this trend.
However, it kind of does feel like Double Fine is losing a lot of its goodwill in the community lately. The DF-9 debacle was the low point, but Broken Age not being what a lot of people hoped for and taking ages to complete is not helping either. I hope the team is able to stop this trend.
CecilRousso
Member
Unfortunately. It's so extremely exaggerated, and DF did a lot of good things when it happened, but you can't really stop people when they get the ideas they got about it.
qualitydisc
Member
I also played Psychonauts for a bit (a couple hours) and didn't really understand the hype. It seemed to be made well but no more so than a good platformer from any other develper.
That said, I'm really looking forward to trying Grim Fandango. I've been curious about it for years but didn't have a convenient way to play it.
Succinct Verbosity
Member
Part of me wants to see Grim Fandango do well because it's one of the best games ver, and the other part just wants it to perform well so that Sony could see the benefits of potentially saving Double Fine if they need help.
I'm having troubles seeing what you mean with the bolded part. Grim Fadango is by far the smallest project out of the three they still have going on.
IIRC that cancelled project was to get its big reveal at E3 2015.
Majesco being the publisher would not be suprising, seeing as their Indie label Midnight City published Double Fine's Costume Quest 2.
Majesco being the publisher would not be suprising, seeing as their Indie label Midnight City published Double Fine's Costume Quest 2.
CecilRousso
Member
That makes me sad to hear
. It would have been awesome to get a completely new Double Fine title announced during E3.It's pretty crazy that Broken Age will have been in development for three years by the time the second episode comes out. For what was once supposed to be a six months affair. A (long) delay was obviously inevitable once DFA crushed all records on Kickstarter - and I'm certainly not complaining over a bigger and more polished game - but going straight to three years is not sensible at all. They seriously mismanaged the development, it's sad.
Sentenza
Member
I actually think it's one of the best written games around.
Then again, it's hard to tell how much of it should be credited to Schafer and how much to Erik Wolpaw.
I would guess the second one really had a big influence on it, because a lot of what I love about Psychonauts (when it comes to writing) reminds me a lot of what I love about Portal, too.
CecilRousso
Member
They have pretty much proven that the gaming audience isn't ready for developers to be this open about their work. Shit happens all the time in software development and similiar projects, but instead of being sympathetic och understanding, people are most often just being dicks about it. :
You can't use that 6 month estimation. They scrapped that before the kickstarter was even finished.
And few people would have been satisfied with what they would have done in six months. As a comparison, look at the Thimbleweed Park kickstarter, by Ron Gilbert. That's being done as a Maniac Mansion style with retro graphics, and that's an 18 month project, where the project owners already are warning for that it will probably be delayed beyond that.
3 years is more then what was planned and what DF themselves wished, but 2-2½ year for a game like that is not strange at all.
EdwardTivrusky
Member
I like what double Fine are trying to do and it sucks that they had to let people go. Hopefully DF can take some of them back and put them to work on the fabled Costume Quest 2 patch for Wii U.
ShinMaruku
Member
When you are sitting on 3-4 projects with that small of a team this is bound to happen. Finish your plate then go for more. They are biting off more than they can chew and they need to hire proper producers for their games.
Sad to hear, I hope those people land on their feet. Double Fine is one of the few development houses that I admire for how laid back their games feel and how it seems like they strive for creativity all the time. Too bad the market hasn't been too receptive to their fantastic efforts.
Production and marketing costs and sales estimates were on a whole another level back in the 90's. The customer base was also significantly lower.
Production and marketing costs and sales estimates were on a whole another level back in the 90's. The customer base was also significantly lower.
Surface of Me
I'm not an NPC. And neither are we.
The original Psychonauts was going to be published by MS IIRC, but again, mismanagement.
CecilRousso
Member
They're amining for a release early next year, january most likely.
JSoup
Banned
If you hit up the backers board on the DF forums, it's a pretty even mix between "whatever, take your time" and "goddamn it, get it done".
For my part, I'm more than willing to push the whole thing out of mind until Steam sends out the update for part 2.
CecilRousso
Member
Some backers are obviously concerned over the delays, but a pretty big part seem to be "I told you so" people. And those people make up the larger part of the Spacebase critique mob.
Hopefully DF can have success with their current projects, and maybe the canceled one can be revived.
Broken Age Act 2 seems to be shaping up well, and the documentary indicated it would have more challenging puzzles (to hopefully win over some of the Act 1 detractors). 2015 could be a good year for DF, given the excitement for Grim Fandango.
Broken Age Act 2 seems to be shaping up well, and the documentary indicated it would have more challenging puzzles (to hopefully win over some of the Act 1 detractors). 2015 could be a good year for DF, given the excitement for Grim Fandango.
Yup, it's been my observation that most people who are complaining about it didn't back it. I backed for 30 bux and even though act 2 isn't out yet, I have definitely already gotten more than my moneys worth with the act 1, PeterMc's soundtrack and 17 episodes of the excellent documentary.
Also, making games takes a long time.
I think Hack n Slash was the second game.
Because they need to have that many smaller projects going on at once to have a somewhat steady stream of releases that create some money for them. Even if they aren't super expensive to develop, their games don't sell well enough to give them the leeway to take their time or have their teams working on just one game.
it was confirmed act 2 would have harder puzzles like 6 months ago, if not earlier than that
tim said "act 1 is going to be easier as we introduce the logic for solving puzzles and we'll ramp up the difficulty in act 2 because people already have an idea of how the thinking process works" in one of the documentary episodes
i for one am glad that adventure games no longer have dumb shit like the fucking rubber ducky from the longest journey though
In addition, having multiple projects means you don't have to let people go. For example, when the artists finish their work in earlier stages of development they would need a new project on which to work. If the company has only one active project it would have to let those artists go until the current one is complete.
charlequin
Banned
Again, this makes no sense. Projects are what pay for staff. You cannot keep an independent studio open without everyone at the company working on a paid project at all times.
It's certainly cheaper in a lot of other places compared to the SF Bay, but I think people exaggerate the actual impact. Even putting aside the fact that an indie studio is locked in location-wise and can't actually relocate the way a major studio could at least consider doing, If you move to someplace like Raleigh, you're looking at turning $100,000 heads into $80,000 heads. Taking 20% off the top certainly isn't nothing but it's not going to turn them into a company that can keep staff on hand when a game gets canceled.
Thanks for the link. I was refering to this article. The sad reality is that this kinf of "profitable" doesn't necessarily greenlight a sequel or the opportunity to do the game you want after that...
I think the public for adventure games was already there, and was stronger than ever actually. I don't exactly know what it cost back then, but since Double Fine is going fully digital since Brutal Legend, there are a lot of expense spared. I have absolutely no idea on how this two cases compares though.
20% of 40 is still 8, which is almost enough in this case. IIRC, DF size is closer to 60 employees than 40, which roughly give us the 12 people laid off.
I run a studio myself, much more smaller, and in a different country, but I think it's true everywhere that 20% less cost is kind of a big deal.
And again, location is just a part of the problem.