I don't see why people who still want to play Double Fine produced games should stop supporting them. I agree that DF-9 was a huge fiasco and that Double Fine came off as disrespectful towards the customers, but I think Valve/Steam's early access model is as much to blame as the developers and producers (?) at Double Fine. I'm not entirely in the know as to why or how the project was dropped, so I won't discuss that in great detail, but from my understanding the director simply stopped being interested in the game. The fact Double Fine still managed to release a "final" product is enough proof that they do care about their customers; most early access games on Steam stay in alpha or beta phases forever, others simply vanish without ever getting released -- at least the guys at Double Fine didn't just take the users' money and ran away, like so many developers with games in early access do.

Video game studios, companies and digital distribution stores are not our friends and are not human beings. They are just that: studios, companies, stores. They are not either holy or evil, and whether we choose to support them or not should have nothing to do with their angelic or demonic posture and attitude. Some people at Double Fine made some mistakes, that's for sure, Broken Age underdelivered because it held so much promise and people had way too high expectations towards it. Tim Schafer always kept backers of the game in on the loop, and most of the people who backed that game are happy with the end product, and eagerly awaiting the second part of it to come out. Granted, the game does look a bit lackluster for a title that cost so much money to produce, one could argue that a lot of indie titles developed with a fraction of that money look way better, and they would be right. It's also true that, because of the development time and 'meh' delivery, the project that put Kickstarter on the map is also the one making people doubt Kickstarter. When all is said and done, though, Broken Age did more good than it did harm. I highly doubt if, without it, without people clearly stating there's still an interest and obviously room in the video game industry for point and click adventure games, the genre had seen the resurgence it's been experiencing. Lots of small (and small-ish) studios started delivering p&c adventure games with success and acclaim, such as Wadjet Eye, Daedalic and, more notoriously, Telltale Games. Sure, some of these studios had been making adventure games forever, but the truth is that before the Double Fine Adventure project they weren't selling particularly well, or even getting as known as they have become after that. So, there's that. As a product, Broken Age may have disappointed a lot of customers, but I think it's far from being the fiasco some people say it is.

As for Grim Fandango... well, it's "just" my personal favorite video game *ever* made, so, excuse me if I pre-ordered it here on GOG. As many people, here, I've been waiting for this game to come out for what it seems like forever, and, to be honest, I couldn't care less whether it's released by Double Fine, Disney/LucasArts or whomever. I just want the opportunity to be able to play it again, with little to no hassle. I also think new generations have the right to buy and play what is arguably one of the best video games ever made. Let's face it, Grim Fandango is not easy to buy in its physical format. I'm lucky enough to own a (very cherished) boxed copy -- which I bought during a trip to the UK, based on the box art alone, after seing it standing in an old shop's window --, but it requires way too much tinkering with to even run on modern systems, let alone run without glitches or issues whatsoever. Plus, let's be honest, here, I know at least three people that know the game because I have it and could never buy it, even though they wanted to, because the game went out of print really fast, there aren't many copies around, it was never reissued and every single person selling it on auction sites or second hand stores charges way more than what non-obsessed collectors can afford. So, basically, they backed up my game CDs and that's how they now "own" and play the game. This isn't fair to them or anyone remotely interested in the game, but Disney isn't going to do anything with it, so they might as well turn to Double Fine. All I know is that people have the right to this game just as much as they have access to Cervante's Don Quixote or Hitchcock's Vertigo. If we live in an age where video games are also seen as an art form, why don't we preserve them just because they're depending on a medium that's ever-evolving? Old games are part of video gaming history, and should be preserved in a way that new generations can enjoy or, at least, have access to. I'm super stoked for this release, and think everyone should be. At least a bit.

I also know that this is a remaster of the original, and how that will alienate purists. It's the same game it has always been, with some minor upgrades and tweaks, and I more than welcome that. For everyone else, keep your pirated versions you downloaded from torrents, at least you're definitely not supporting the demons at Double Fine Productions, and you're doing one hell of a job at keeping the video game industry healthy by pirating one of the landmarks of the history of the adventure genre. Thumbs up.

I will most likely buy (although not pre-order) the game, not because it's DoubleFine but because it's freaking Grim Fandango (with a native Linux port!).

But I think what this thread and many of the other anti-DoubleFine threads show is that DF has a big PR problem at the moment and really should look into ways to get some of the people, many of them former Tim Schafer and DF fans, on its side again somehow.

I did write some massive post in reply to this, but I don't think the thread is worth the time. Basically, they make great games but they have screwed up in the past. As the company is comprised of humans, and humans make mistakes, this was inevitable. Calling Grim Fandango Remastered a cash grab is stupid because, well, they need to pay the bills. Making money is their business, which I bet their employee's families really appreciate (a home with food on the table isn't free). I also take umbrage at the whole 'cash grab' concept because from the looks of things they've done everything right by their fans by simply 'remastering' and not 'remaking'. The price tag is pretty damn reasonable, too.

Yes, Spacebase was a screw up - but they've done plenty more right than they have wrong. I like to think people are better than to condemn a large group of people from varying backgrounds, circumstances etc. just because of a past failure.

Exactly. This is something I though about from the very beginning of the Broken Age project, seeing all the criticism about the amount of money they were using for a game of this scale. Double Fine is NOT a young and new indie company with three people working in a small office, they have the habit to work on bigger projects with bigger budgets, and with publishers, so they have a pretty big studio with a lot of equipment, and with experienced employees. All this must cost a lot of money, even if they have no work to do.


Same here. And I have no real interest to play a game that is not finished. For me it's like paying to watch a movie, with half of the scenes missing or unfinished. I can easily understand that other people do have an interest in that, no problem here, but you must be aware of the risks you take by buying something that is not yet finished, has absolutely no guarantee to be finished for real, and can simply change along the development.

The only real problem for me is that it shouldn't be called "early access". This marketing gimmick strongly suggests that you just pay to have access to a full game before its release, when it's not. It should only suggest that you are funding the already advanced development of a game, being rewarded by being able to play work-in-progress versions until the hypothetical full release.

That's true. Personally I can't think of a single reason why I would want to play early access -games. Let's take "The Book of Unwritten Tales 2" as an example. I liked the previous games of the series and I will buy this one when it's finished, but I'm not going to buy it in it's early access -state, because I don't want to spoil the puzzles and the story by playing it before it's ready.

This is news to me. When have Double Fine been unable to produce Broken Age? I'm a backer who has been watching the game's development over the few past years (just watched the latest documentary episode last week). I'm looking forward to playing the second half in the next few months (they just hit beta). What's this about them not being able to produce it?

That question can have many answers:

Taking three years for a simple 2D adventure game;

going episodic for lack of money even though they started with 2.1 million dollar from the get-go;

announcing Act 2 to be delivered three to four months after Act 1 and then taking an additional year without much of an explanation;

handing out DRM free versions of Act 1 to their backers only one full month after the Steam version, and only after massive protest in their forum;

a long row of extremely repetitive, self glorifying video advertorials which backers have paid for as a "documentary";

simplistic cut out style animation in an eight+ million dollar product, animation that often doesn't even illustrate picking up an object;

ruthless mobile optimization of controls and therewith impoverishment of adventure game mechanics: one click, one mouse button, one verb and hardly ever more than three hotspots per screen.


I rather liked Act 1, I must say. But I understand everyone who finds above stuff simply inexcusable. :(

As a developer myself, I can absolutely understand the amount of time it took to make the game, especially considering that when they started the team had no experience in 2D games, and had no development tools to make such a thing. 2HB may have been made with MOAI, but that's definitely not something that eases the process much, as you still have to make a frontend for MOAI to work for adventure games, since MOAI isn't designed that way from the get go. Take a look at adventure engine as an example. It's also an adventure game frontend for MOAI, and the code required for that frontend is not minimal. Getting it to work as intended and bug free is not a quick task (and I speak from experience in this, as I have coded a game in that very MOAI adventure engine myself).

Tim's explained this himself, and you've mentioned it before too. It costs $10,000 per month per employee to make a game in San Francisco. That number sounds about right, as developing in San Francisco is not cheap. The cost of living there is high, so the wages for employees would have to be high (at least high 5 figure salary, if not 6 figure) to be competitive, and add on to that the fact that all of the employees who work at Double Fine have full insurance plans (with full medical and dental coverage), which has to be provided by the employer since the United States doesn't offer government medical plans and all plans have to be purchased through commercial health providers, plus incidental insurance coverage for each employee in case of being hurt on the job (which is also required in the US, which has to be paid for by the employer, again for the same reasons), plus the cost of rent/mortgage/taxes (the expenditure of which would depend on the situation, and as far as I know it's never been revealed whether Double Fine owns the building they are in), which would all be really high in San Francisco, and utilities. If you factor all of that in, the amount that the team has been announced to have spent certainly adds up to the given required expenditures (which is $10,000 per employee, per month, over roughly three years, not including the cost for the voice actors (which would be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the employees, even with the Hollywood list of talent employed), Peter McConnell, or the cost to hire the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra).

They explained this well I thought. They're taking fan feedback into account and are making a much better game than they originally planned. Act 2 is going to be longer than the first act, and the puzzles are going to be harder as well. Because the scope is larger than originally intended, it's taking a lot longer to make. The end result is that we're going to have a better product as we're going to get a longer game with more challenging puzzles than we would have gotten if the team ignored fan feedback and stuck to their original deadlines.

Yeah, this definitely was a major oversight on the team's part. But, it's unlikely to happen again, since Double Fine is getting much better at making DRM-free releases, as proven by the fact that Grim Fandango Remastered is getting a DRM-free release on day one of release (and since Broken Age is published by Double Fine themselves (as is the case with the computer versions of Grim Fandango Remastered), Act 2 will likely appear DRM-free on day one as well since they don't have to worry about convincing publishers to do so).

They were a lot more than just advertorials. They were a good insight into the development process that we normally don't get to see. I enjoyed them a lot, and thought they were exactly what Tim Schafer pitched them to be in the kickstarter (which was 2 Player Productions following the team around the office and taping the development as it happened). There were a lot of dark times shown too, not just the good. The one released earlier this year that showed the end of the 2014 development wasn't all rainbows and sunshine, it was a team that was clearly stressed and having a hard time solving a problem and the environment wasn't happy at that particular time it showed in the video. That's clearly not something that anyone would want to show if it was meant to be a self glorifying advertisement.

It has already been shown that the entire budget is going into making the product so they're not squandering anything. But, yeah, there's definitely room to improve (also keep in mind that since the team had no 2D experience prior to this, they were learning as they went on, since animation in game development is more than just animation, it requires setting the characters up in the tools, and the tools were being built on the fly, which surely hampered the process). Now that the team has adequate 2D experience (with Broken Age Act I, and other 2D games like Middle Manager of Justice under their belt), hopefully they'll have improved and we'll see some more incidental animations (like, as you said, picking up objects) in Act 2.

This is more of a design reason than one for mobile devices. Remember, Telltale Games also had a one click interface long before they went to mobile platforms, for design reasons, and not for device concerns. Mobile devices don't need such optimizations anyway. I've played classic point and click games on mobile devices before with ScummVM (including commercial ones such as Simon the Sorcerer) and they play great on mobile devices.

If I were to elaborate on my statement, I believe Double Fine have, considering how much money they were given and based on what other companies have succeeded in doing, failed to produce Broken Age to a reasonable schedule.

They may have their reasons but by the standards of their peers they just have not matched up and that counts against them in my book.

But I also know it was kind of foolish to pledge towards a kickstarter with such a vague goal and I'm definitely never doing that again.

I had my original Grim Fandango copy stolen from me, and a friend of mine did actually burn me a Grim Fandango copy back in the day, so i can't see anything wrong about pre-ordering this game from GOG.

Recently i bought a 2nd hand copy of Grim Fandango and both discs were scratched and i couldn't get the game working properly on my current PC, and the ResidualVM refused the run the game on 1080p.

I hope DoubleFine can also "fix" Monkey Island 4, since i really hated the Monkey combat parts ^^

Wow. I'm dumbfounded. Are you actually suggesting this as a valid complaint, or is this just your impression of what OTHER people think?

Grim Fandango took 3 years and four months to produce, and had a budget of $4.6 million, taking into account inflation. Many things still had to be cut from that game in order to make that deadline.

Both feature 3D characters, but Broken Age is FAR more advanced. They had to build a new game engine that supported several different platforms, including mobile, for one thing.

Why would this be a cause for getting upset? Do you think anyone complains today that Grim Fandango took over three years to produce? This is a short-sighted complaint akin to on a "I want it now!" attitude. Again, the game IS being delivered, and once it is, nobody will remember how long it took.

They never made any such announcement. It was clear that once Act 1 went live that they wouldn't be committing themselves to an end date for Act 2... and they didn't. As for "without much of an explanation", you mean besides from the regular release of documentary updates detailing the game's production?

It was only ever the plan to release the finished game DRM-free. This was explained very clearly, several times. When enough backers asked for a DRM free version of Act 1, they acquiesced and gave it them anyway. Now you're complaining that they did?

This is where I question if you're being serious or not. 2 Player Productions are the sole voice behind the the documentary series. DF has no say into what gets placed in them. This has been stated by 2PP and DF, and is evidenced by the obvious fact that EVERYONE has come off badly at one point or another. To try and claim that 2PP have been anything but revealing and insightful is completely dishonest of you, and incredibly insulting to the work of 2PP.

This is the first I've heard anyone suggest that Broken Age was anything but utterly gorgeous (which it is).

You're the first person I've ever heard voice such unreasonable and dishonest complaints.

Grim Fandango took 3 years and four months to produce, and had a budget of $4.6 million, taking into account inflation. Plus it only had to be made for one platform -- Windows. Why do you think that a modern adventure game, with superior artwork, animation and audio, made for multiple platforms, should take less time than this?

Also, please explain which "peers" you're referring to, when talking about recently produced adventure games.

I will not reply to an insulting post.

I'm sorry you felt it was insulting.

Edit: I asked at the backer forums what people thought of the documentary. Here's the results:

http://i.imgur.com/PeSnrj1.png