I would rather not expect AAA quality from non-AAA companies in the first place. With board games, they usually deliver what they promised to deliver and it's great. Quality of the game can be lower, there is a reason why those guys can't find a publisher.

I'm not... actually sure what everybody is all worked up about. Is it because of the "I told you so" aspect? Yes, we know kickstarter is a bubble, dutch tulips and stuff. So is every risky venture. Now you know how big publishers feel and why they want to secure their investments.

Or am I reading the announcement differently? The only thing that it actually says is: less money than projected in light to the scope of the game - thus delayed - steam early access might be able to generate more funds - in spite of everything, not prepared to bastardise the game to bridge the void.

Now everybody just take a deep breath. I'm sure most of you will agree that it's too early to start to panic. Or at all, anyway.

So basically, the lesson in all this for game developers is "Don't show the people how the sausage gets made".

If making the sausage involves slaughtering twice as many pigs as is needed because of bad efficiency, yeah, don't show how the sausage is made.

*shrug* Sounds like standard procedure in the games industry. Delays, underfunding, logistical headaches, poor planning, unforeseen catastrophes, etc....what is actually new about this situation except that people have some glimpses of the process?

It's Double or Nothing!

What I read was like: will finish at least one year later, maybe two years later. Might run out of money in the meantime if we cannot generate more funds (relying on some Steam thing for this), game is designed so that either it's gonna be big or broken. Now I didn't want this. I wanted a nice little, polished game which comes more or less in time. Since they fail to deliver what they promised even with a fairly good budget I now assume they will never ever deliver.

KS TOS say you should deliver what you promise, otherwise you have to pay back. At least that's how I understood them. They might publish a game but long after the date they promised. Taking into account their financial problems it seems even less probable. They very probably screwed up, or what do you think?

Double? OK, fine...

This time customers pay for misdevelopments, but they have no share in the potential benefit whatsorever. It's just an unfair situation, which theoretically is corrected by the KS terms which oblige project owners to deliver (in time). We could see it as a lottery, but I wouldn't find this very satisfying.

I doubt it. If they released a game that looked more or less like Deponia but had the Shafer and Lucasarts style, people would have loved it and got what they asked for. And while I am not a developer I really doubt Deponia cost more than three million dollars to make, though of course that's in Germany and not San Francisco (which I think is a core issue).

Well now we're getting into assumptions about budgets we don't really know about. Like I said though, I really can't imagine Deponia cost more than three million. I guess I could be wrong. Surely you would never suggest the Blackwell games cost that, however.

Either way it all boils down to the same issue. They had X amount of money and designed a game that cost way more than that to make. They admit that themselves. They are very blunt about the fact they totally mismanaged the budget and design and screwed this up.

The only question is how pissed about this you choose to be. Personally I think it's pretty heinous, especially since they just did another Kickstarter.

Well I definitely agree on that, going over-budget is pretty common, but 100% over-budget and nearly two years late (if they release the game in 2015) is a little too much to say the least.

Well personally I consider KS as being a mix between charity and gambling, you pay for an idea and hope for it to someday, hopefully, become reality; I won with LSL Remake, I lose with Shadowrun 2, and the odds are still up in the air for Broken Age.

If you go to the public and say I want top make this game and need that amount of money, there's actually no need to change the concept if you get more money. It just shows that more people than you anticipated like your project. Sure, you can define stretch goals for larger amounts of money, but if all that gets blown out of the water by the amount of money that you get, you should just stick to your word: Take the money and deliver what you promised. Nobody would be pissed when he got exactly what he payed for.

That's it right there, my main peeve of Kickstarter. I personally would be satisfied with copyright in the public domain with these projects (third-party copyrights would still be a huge pain in the ass though), but if that's not the case and the developers are using DRM or whatever else to try to make more money after the game is finished, then backers should be getting some kind of return from that.