[nostromo]

If you'll allow me to be a bit rude, why do you care?

I mean, it's $20 dude.

I understand the anger and skepticism a person feels when they make $30k a year and back a project for $50 that fails. But I don't understand it on HN. We're programmers and entrepreneurs. We know that timelines and resources are difficult to forecast. We know that companies and projects fail, even when they have millions of dollars to spend. We also generally make enough that $20 lost is negligible.

Yet everytime I look at the comments section for a Kickstarter I see mostly permutations of this comment.

[teej]

> I mean, it's $20 dude.

Here's how I see it. For context, I backed Broken Age for $100 and have the t-shirt. I typically spend $1,000+ on games a year.

####################

If I wanted a game for my $20 I could:

* Buy 3-5 classic 90s games on GOG.com

* Buy 1-2 indie games on Steam

* Buy 1 AAA game on sale, 6-12 months post release

The alternative of putting my $20 on Kickstarter is relatively well known now. I:

* Get to support an indie dev with a passionate vision

* Get sneek peek access during game development

* Potentially get the final product

And I'm okay with those tradeoffs. I don't back every game project on Kickstarter, but I have backed some. Sometimes my $20 is better spent on released games and sometimes it's better spent on Kickstarter.

The issues raised around Massive Chalice are different. They aren't general Kickstarter concerns - they're specific to this project and this developer. A big part of the Kickstarter experience is that we, the consumers, are shouldering a small amount of the risk of the project. That's not a bad thing, but in the case of Double Fine the risk profile has significantly changed.

For Broken Age (previously Double Fine Adventure), we were dealing with a long-standing game development studio taking a chance on crowdfunding a game that publishers simply wouldn't touch. As far as we knew, they had a history of delivering high quality games.

All those things are still true with Massive Chalice, but now consumers have more data then we had before. We got a detailed look in to the sausage factory. We've seen delay after delay. We've seen a project originally scoped at $400k get overfunded and go over it's new $3m budget. They say we'll get the game in September, but who really knows? I think it's rational to say that those events could instill uncertainty about Double Fine.

So it's not that I won't back Massive Chalice because games projects on Kickstarter are risky. I won't back it because I know exactly how Double Fine has handled a kickstarted game in the past. They've trained me to expect fantastic communication about the project as it develops. They've trained me to get excited to see the sneak peeks. But they've also trained me to expect delays and budget overruns. What happens if Broken Age doesn't sell well? Will they have more Brutal Legend residuals to fall back on? If they run over budget on Massive Chalice, will they run another kickstarter for another game just to make sure they can keep their people employed? I don't know.

And so frankly, I'm not excited about Broken Age anymore. After the 15 months that have passed, the lackluster trailer, and all the delays, I just don't feel the same about Double Fine as I did before. That, on top of seeing the way they've handled the project, and being concerned about the financial situation of the company, I just can't muster $20 for Massive Chalice.

####################

Yes, it's just $20, but games are a ruthless business and there's a lot of other places my $20 could go. At this point, instead of supporting Massive Chalice, I'm going to buy a new skin in Dota 2. Or maybe I'll buy the Humble Indie Bundle 8. Or maybe I'll buy whatever is on sale on Steam this week. Who knows?

[vectorpush]

Well put. If I went 5 months off schedule and 750% over budget and then asked the bosses to finance my next project without having delivered anything... I mean... well I'd probably just have been fired at 400% over budget.

[arrrg]

But they did not went 750% over budget. The budget was $3.3m. And with the bigger scope comes a – obviously – a longer dev time.

Oh, and also, backers do get tons of content all the time.

[giulianob]

Thats kind of the problem with the stretch goals. It just makes the development even more difficult and the wait longer a lot of the times because more money doesn't always mean you can work faster.

[vectorpush]

No, the budget was 400k. In what bizzaro world does 750% more funding delay project completion by five months? Just because you have extra money doesn't mean you should expand your budget to max out all your resources; try that excuse with any VC and tell me how it goes. Fortunately for Double Fine they're not actually responsible for how they spend their money.

[jamornh]

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that if Double Fine took the $3.3 million and delivered a 2D, mobile, prototype-esque game (which if you watched the documentary, was what they would have gone for with the $400,000) in the timeline they stated, people would have been happy.

It's exactly like they took the $2.9 million and ran. I think quite a lot of people would call that a scam at that point. In the end, with an extra $2.9 million, what were they going to do with it other than make sure that the game they end up delivering lives up to the huge sum that their fans gave them?

[aptwebapps]

The budget was 400k for the basic version, then they got 3.3m and changed the scope. So 3.3m was the new budget, or perhaps some number in between and the difference was pure profit.

[kinnth]

here, here.

[TillE]

HN seems to view Kickstarter mostly through the lens of hardware projects, which are incredibly risky and done with very thin margins.

Game development by an experienced team is not quite a guaranteed thing, but it is a much safer bet.

[sejje]

Agree with this. The risk should be very minimal that they can't, at the very least, ship the game as expected.

Whether they can make it a success is a different kind of risk.

[nkassis]

I bet a lot of people on HN don't even make 30K a year. It's a little weird to be assuming that everyone here is working in Silicon Valley making 100K+. Particularly for a site dedicated to early stage startups and tech and the philosophy of being frugal to lunch startups.

[raldi]

What do you think of someone who commits $1 million in insurance fraud? Spread out amongst all the other customers and shareholders, it comes to a very small amount per person, certainly less than $20. But you'd still be mad about it, wouldn't you?

[pliny]

Not everyone here is from the Bay Area.

[jasonlotito]

What does that have to do with anything?

[T-Winsnes]

To people outside of the US, $20 might be a substantial amount of money.

Saying "It's just $20" could, to them, be same as saying "It's just $1 000" to you.

[jasonlotito]

The comment said the Bay, not the US. Even still, if $20 is $1000 for you, then it's absurd to think you'd put it on a game on KickStarter.

[wmf]

There has to be a line between acceptable risk and throwing good money after bad. I suspect Double Fine is on the right side of the line in this case, but if we let "it's $20 dude" excuse everything then we're opening ourselves up to outright fraud (as another poster said). So I think it'd good to question cases like these.

[thoughtcriminal]

$20 to a homeless guy or to someone experiencing economic hardship will be appreciated more.

[papsosouid]

>fraud is totally cool because we're programmers and entrepreneurs

No, it really isn't. This is not a kickstarter to make a game, this is a kickstarter to help pay for the game they already made a kickstarter for before. It isn't about risk, it is about fraud.

[levesque]

Interesting how a lot of people in here assume this is a fraud to support their previous project. Why couldn't they honestly be starting a new project with a separate team?

[6thSigma]

Because there is nothing controversial in that.

[papsosouid]

Yes, it is interesting how a lot of people assume that the most likely explanation is the right one. Of course it is possible that they got money somewhere else and don't need this kickstarter cash to keep the company afloat while they finish their known to be delayed and overbudget game. It just isn't very likely.

[visural]

Do you have any evidence, because that would be news-worthy. Or are you just making stuff up?