Double Fine Disgust Me And They Desperately Need An Actual Accountant
Twice now, I've had to hear about early releases from Double Fine. Both times, they've made me feel sick. How the fuck do you always go over budget, Tim? How?!
So you probably don't need context for this. Everyone's been blowing up about the shame that is Spacebase DF-9. So am I. I am still furious about Broken Age. Even more so because of the way consumers reacted to this nonsense the first time around. I'd been a bit cautious about posting about this, waiting to see what everyone said but, with all the hype surrounding Costume Quest 2, after all of the bullshit that Double Fine has brought on their consumers, I couldn't just sit idly by anymore.
The first time around, Broken Age came up late and half missing. After a staggering near 1000% of their original, overly ambitious goal of $400,000, somehow, as if by magic, Tim Schafer and team went over budget before even the first half of the game was completed. They kept saying things like "with more money, we made the game bigger and better." It was a four hour half-a-game built on a pre-existing engine. Double Fine currently employs 65 people according to Wikipedia (I can't claim that's accurate but it is still there). We all know Double Fine have like four or five teams going at once.
So the question is; where the fuck did all the money go? How many times did they restart their adventure before they finally settled? How much bullshitting did they do? How many people were actually working on it? How the fuck does it take almost two years for a team of the size required to burn through over three million to make a four hour adventure, especially one that underwhelming?
And then there are the backers. They got their game late, only half finished, and nowhere near revitalizing the adventure genre as it was during Tim Schafer's heyday. What was the response I heard most? "Oh, well, we got a documentary out of it. That's enough for me?" What the fuck is wrong with those people?! If it were any other Kickstarter, 90% of the backers would be demanding blood and refunds.
This isn't even the worst part, though. They need more money so they release the first half of the game. Within a month, they make enough to make the second half. They then schedule the second half of the game for April or May. It's now almost November. Oh, sure, that's fine. They must be updating people, right? Sort of. The last official update was in April. It was controller support. That's a far cry from the promised update. Backers got a new update. After waiting for three months. This link says that that last update involves "a fatal flaw in the game's design that will require special attention." That doesn't sound good. Might be another three months until they solve it!
Anyways, in comes Spacebase DF-9, Double Fine's first Early Access game. Grand plans were made (plans now scrubbed from the live page). It cost $400,000 to bring it to its barebones Early Access state that people didn't really see coming together. If that sounds odd, it probably is, although you won't see me digging into Double Fine's financials because I'll probably puke in disgust all over them.
This investment? Recouped. In a mere two weeks. Since then? It could be a month before they even followed up 5b with 5c. And while the updates were sometimes large in number, they were all minor fixes for the most part. New content was little. Seriously, just read the patch notes. They barely had even figured out how they wanted citizens to work by the time they end, slowly adding more to them like "Characters have affinities for rooms, and use them to make decisions" which was added in July, only 3 months ago.
Then, last month, Tim Schafer released a note about what happened with Spacebase DF-9. Let's take a look at some of the key points.
"One of the biggest lessons we have learned in this, our first early access title, is about communication. There should have been more communication to the players about the state of the game, and we apologize for that."
Fat lot of good they've done with that, so far. Apparently, the only way they can communicate updates to Broken Age backers is still through documentary. Making statements that just announce more delays. Three months between.
"We put every dime we made from Spacebase back into Spacebase, and then we put in some more.
That was the effect of putting every dime in? From what I've heard from people, it's barely a game, much less a finished one! You even handed people the source code in hopes that they'd finish it out of buyer's remorse! How can you even go on to say the following?
"But we continued to sell the game, and will continue to sell the game, because we feel that based solely on its own merits, Spacebase DF9 is still a fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete game."
What? You think cutting a game short mid-what-you-called-alpha and plugging all of the obvious holes makes it finished? I am just baffled. "We didn't deliver what we said we would. We didn't even deliver a portion of what we said we would. We also didn't give you notice. But forgive us because we think it's a good game." Fuck. Of course you'd say that. Anyone trying to save their fumbling career would.
The entire thing sickens me. If you get anything from my angry rant, it should be this; STOP GIVING DOUBLE FINE MONEY. They are clearly happy to piss it away while making repeated promises they can't keep. I've watched Trek Industries slave over Orion: Prelude for years, constantly updating it while simultaneously lowering the price and still living in relative obscurity. The same game. Free updates. I won't claim to know how they keep going but they do. And that's the thing. Double Fine doesn't. Or they do but they half ass it and release it late.
Double Fine isn't the company that they were around the time of Brutal Legend and Psychonauts. By freeing themselves from publishers, Tim Schafer and team are having to face the harsh reality that funds are finite and you can't just blow them. And, rather than fix it, they seem happy to cut corners or just deliver a subpar product to keep their heads above the water. Are these really the people we want to idolize? To give our money willingly based solely on a past career? Fuck no.
