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by int3rnaut 5239 days ago
Do you think there is ever a risk to being "over-funded"? I know it sounds stupid, but it's an honest question.
4 comments

'course there is, but Schafer and Gilbert have been in the industry for some 40 years combined, and Double Fine seems to be nicely run as a pretty tight ship.

I think that's a case where it shouldn't be too much of a risk.

Yes!

It's a pretty big risk too. But for a digital project like this with a limited number of physical rewards that risk is pretty small.

For a project that's about physical production there are serious risks that smart folks should be wary of. It's one thing to produce a limited run of products (say, a few hundred) it's another thing to have to produce tens of thousands in order to satisfy pre-orders. For example, you might have a small team manufacturing stuff and you might be able to stretch out your production run from a minimum of a few days or weeks up to a year or so and that'll buy you a factor of 10 in production output, but if you get 100x or 1,000x pre-orders you may have to go to a dramatically different production system and hire staff, which could be enormously risky.

For games, yes I think there is. If you have too much money, you can drag it out, always adding new things, etc. If you are making a new OS (or web broweser, or something), then with more money you can develop more/better software. Linux has been under active development for 20 years, and will likely continue for many more years, Linux will probably never be "done", but a game can be "done".