I think it's a courtesy, by the beneficiary, to ask backers what they think. Not mandatory.

I don't think I said this!

Yep. It's called marketing, and it works :)

I don't really see the problem with all this, to be honest. In the end I'm still getting my game, for the price I paid for it. There aren't many kickstarters that do deliver on time :P And in the meantime there's the awesome documentary.

Wow, really? What a shame, they're lovely!

I don't see the difference. Quality entertainment is just as much about craftmansip as construction work and cooking are.

But how much are they cutting from the 3-million design? They said "modest cuts" Schafer already said the game would be smaller than Full Throttle, which itself was a very short adventure. Have they stated at all how many rooms/puzzles they actually plan for the whole game?

And entertainment they (at least, most of the backers who **blindly keep supporting such a incompetent company** or whatever you want to call DF) had by watching videos and images and commenting and bitching with Double Fine.

Most of all, they weren't "hired to build a house". A project was founded to program a videogame, solely on the basis of trust in what they have done in the past.

Not "I give you money and you give me a thing", instead "You give me money and I make a thing. When it's done, you'll have a cake. Meanwhile, taste these cookies"

This is wrong. The second part will still get made. They're not holding it hostage against good sales of Ep1.
I don't think competence means what you think it means.

I don't understand why you write that the campaign wasn't about a game. I cannot think about what else it could have been about. After all it was in the video games section of KS.

I expected a 3m$ game (not a 300k$ game and also not a 6m$ game) at the delivery date that they promised or maybe a couple of months later. But you're right. With the increased scope one can expect a longer production time. So I should be more patient. Let's see how far they are next year.

All that remains are some extremely strong signs of mismanagement.

Exactly. Silicon Knights was exactly like this. They made some great games when they had Crystal Dynamics and Nintendo looking over their shoulders all the time.

Not really... They need extra money to deliver only what they promised in kickstarter + strech goals.

There won't be anything extra because of this early access in the game, to be honest, there probably will be less. How much less, time will show.

If all Kickstarter games are going to be just as non-complex and short as FTL or what they said with Shadowrun... It's not gonna be good. (for me)

it doesn't run out of ideas after 3 hours? If not, I'm gonna... wishlist it :P

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean it wasn't about the game, I meant it didn't specify anything about the game. It was just supposed to be an old school point and click adventure. Even Tim Schafer had absolutely no idea what the game will be like. Whatever people expected the game to be at the time was purely something they came up with in their minds. I can perfectly understand the expectation that the game will use the entire budget and not any more, but that doesn't imply anything about the game proper.

I do think it's a failure on DF's side (although one I can understand), but I also think an issue of unreasonable expectations of some backers. It's that pre-order mentality that Kickstarter is trying to stamp out, the thought that you're just buying a game. Especially in this case where the pitch itself said that you might not get one.

OK, so I wasn't the only person thinking that. Full Throttle was a big game for the era, in terms of space, but it was a pretty short game overall. Even shorter if you were good at adventure games and understood the game designer's logic.

Well campaign is fairly story-based, but no, you will not get introduced to new mechanics after initial 3 hours. Nevertheless, you will get to visit new locations, meet new NPCs, get new quests and so on and so forth (and maybe you'll even get new mechanics - after all, I have only played it for about 5 hours, then I thought it would be nice if I actually bought the bloody thing, so I quit and I'm waiting for my salary)

Which is totally scary.

I did back Wasteland and LSL where all they knew was pretty basic. But, in both cases they knew what the game was about, it's just that they hadn't actually written any of it.

It seems to me that people shouldn't be backing projects that are complete unknowns. I know that Double Fine is a known entity, but there really should have been a lot more detail to what they were going to do.

It's understandable that things can't be 100% locked down in terms of scope until the checks clear, but they really should have had a pretty good idea about what they wanted to do with X amount of money. And what they could do with Y amount of money if need be.

EDIT: Shadow Run was the same way, I'll love to get a copy of it, when they start selling it without the DRM. I was majorly POed by them backtracking on that detail. Fortunately, they were willing to give me my money back. But, they really should have disclosed that sooner.

Indeed, this isn't an indie team that's never done a project of this scope before, these people are supposed to know how to manage a project like this.

Apart from the gaffe with the DRM loophole, Jordan and crew have done a much better job with Shadow Run Returns in terms of having just a concept and filling in the details based upon the budget. From the looks of it, Wasteland 2 is in a similar situation where it looks like they've done a good job of managing things, despite not having anything actually written or designed before the campaign.