HiPhish: I don't care that they got more money than they expected, that's not how you do business. You start out with a plan for what you want to do and an estimate on how much time, money and manpower you will need. You leave yourself a small buffer in case something unexpected happens, because something will always happen, and that's what you set as your limits according to.
When it comes to Kickstarter you have to take into account the possibility that the amount of money you get is all the money you will ever get. A Kickstarter pledge is not an investment from an investor, it is a purchase by a customer. If you are releasing a product with a small appeal you have to expect that those Kickstarter purchases are all the sales you will get. So if you invest all of your Kickstarter money in it, you will only break even, not make profit.
Let's say I want to make a game that will cost me 100,000$ to produce (just some random number) and I get 500,000$ dollars. If I stick to my plan I will make 400,000$ profit. However, if I stretch my budget to 500,000$ all the profit is gone. Sure, I will make regular sales after release, but the majority of people who were interested into the game have already bought it.
Of course Double Fine had no idea what they were going to make, Tim Schafer just came out on camera like a Simpsons character "Hello, my name is Tim Schafer, you might remember me from games like Monkey Island and Full Throttle", and expected people to throw free money at him.
And yes, a point & click adventure is cheaper to produce than an RPG or FPS. Adventure games have no physics, no networking, no game rules, no balancing, no big levels, no actual mechanics... there is a reason why these types of games were so prevalent in the early days of home computers. All you need is a programmer, an artist and someone to design the puzzles and story.
You're right that you need to pay artists and composers, sure, but I never said that you didn't. Now in regards to voice actors, I don't understand the obsession of game companies to hire Hollywood actors to do voices. An actor is not a voice actor, they have different skill. It's incredible what real voice actors can do with their voices. So why on earth would you hire a body actor to do the work of a voice actor? I'll tell you why: because you got free money thrown at you and you really want to put "voiced by Elijah Wood" in your credits.
deonast: I think some people blow things out of proportion a little.
HiPhish: Over. Budget. On. 800%. Funding. If that is blown out of proportion
a little for you then I don't want to know what would be justified criticism. Maybe if Double Fine tanked the entire economy you might see a problem with their money handling.
A lot of what you say about game development costs just isn't necessarily true. With Flash, a lot of people could make Mario about as quickly as they could make an old point-click game. Maybe even faster, since side-scrollers can reuse visual assets a lot more than a point-click storybook game. You can make levels that look and play with totally new images and mechanics, but Super Mario Bros had what, overworld, underground, water, and lava dungeon? That's about it. Also, AAA movies are ridiculously expensive, and guess what? In your own words,
"No game rules, no balancing, no big levels, no actual mechanics." The larger picture about biting off more than they can chew is a serious strike against the studio for sure. But "lolol point click so easy to make" is about as true as saying "I can make Pixar movies in my basement". The labor hours simply go somewhere else.
If they want to sign Elijah Wood, fine. Unless you have the same gripe with the film industry in general, which is a bit inflated on the A-list celebrity side, granted. But if a game developer wants to use an interactive medium to do a movie-like sort of thing, then being able to sign big names is a sign that people take games more seriously than they used to.
I haven't played Broken Age yet, and I don't know a ton about it. Budget bungling is bad. But I'm not against the concept of signing a Hollywood voice that people will instantly recognize, especially if it's a sort of niche personality who fits with the aesthetic and communicates a little of what they're going for just by him being there.
-----------------
About Massive Chalice itself - It's pretty slow starting off so far, and kind of repetitive. There's a lot of fog of war, and the monsters don't really seek you out pre-emptively. It makes for a pretty slow pace, and on Normal it doesn't start out very hard at all. I sort of feel like the "high concept, bland execution" criticism someone else gave to the studio seems to fit this title so far. Maybe it gets more interesting after it develops, but they didn't really start on a very compelling foot IMO.
