At the end of last week, Double Fine Games started fundraising for an adventure title; no publisher was willing to help the popular quirky game developer. Well, every single publisher is now kicking themselves because Double Fine–as of the time this piece was published–has raised over four times the amount they expected fans to provide them with for this classic style adventure game title. They did all this on a simple Kickstarter page.
By now, 45,000+ people have supported the project. Originally, $150,000 of the budget was supposed to go to making the title and $50,000 was supposed to go into a documentary covering the development cycle. If you look at the numbers, that’s only half of the expected budget. Together with government taxes and what Kickstarter takes out, Double Fine will lose about half of the original fundraising money.
The Internet is still a tool that people are continually utilizing in new and different ways, but for now it’s pretty cool to think that a game developer can be funded by its fans for a game. This story makes me wish that Bungie would have done the same, instead of arranging contracts with Activision. The next update that we’ll have on this story will be on March 14th as by then the Kickstarter project will have wrapped up fundraising.
