If Double Fine got $400,000 for their Adventure game, they would have made a very small-scale game probably in Flash.Im sceptical about their ability to follow through on this project. Broken Age was massively overfunded if you look at the initial target sum, yet they still ran into pretty big problems during development, asking for additional funds. The finished game wasnt very long either, and act 2 was very half-assed, with a lot of recycling and padding going on. I mean, if this is the game that 3,5 million dollars bought, what the hell would that initial 400 000 dollar target have given us?
Couple that with the Spacebase df 9 disaster, and I have serious worries that this game is eventually going to get stuck in development hell, or be extremely bare bones when it releases. I get the feeling that they were hoping (maybe even assuming) to massively overshoot their initial funding target for this project given their history with KS, giving them enough leeway to actually deliver on the game. That didnt happen, and I suppose we are about to find out what kind of game they can actually deliver when they dont get overfunded and dont have the breathing room that they have grown accustomed to.
What if they stuck to their original plan once they got $3.3 million? I'm sure everyone would have been super duper happy about that.
Spacebase DF-9 was a different story entirely. It wasn't crowd funding. They went into Early Access expecting Early Access to fund continued development. It didn't, so they stopped.
Double Fine has never failed to deliver on a crowd-funding campaign.
But Broken age is already pretty small, and not that ambitious in point and click standards. I mean you can always say " just imagine it smaller!", but what does that mean when the released product with 9x the budget of the original pitch itself turned out very modest?
My fear is that they simply didnt do a very good job with the planning and development of Broken Age and overpromised with their initial pitch. The additional money saved their asses that time, and they just assumed that they will get the same leeway this time.
Broken Age is not a small game. It's a 12-15 hour adventure game of similar scope (or bigger) to games like Full Throttle and others.
Maybe you didn't like it, but it wasn't small.