Thanks, that makes sense as I was looking at it through the Web store where I wasn't logged in.
Double Fine launch Spacebase DF-9 on Steam Early Access
- Thread starter Randdalf
- Start date
dark_inferno
Member
So Double Fine is working on Broken Age, Spacebase and Massive Chalice and they will probably released in 2015?
Why is Spacebase and Broken Age overpriced?
Whats with the money from Amnesia Fortnight?
Where is Autonomous?
I have the feeling Double Fine is in deep trouble.
Why is Spacebase and Broken Age overpriced?
Whats with the money from Amnesia Fortnight?
Where is Autonomous?
I have the feeling Double Fine is in deep trouble.
Baron_Calamity
Member
I don't get that at all. I don't find any of this overpriced nor desperation. This is just a new way to develop games and we are seeing inside the sausage factory. I wonderful, magical sausage factory, but a sausage factory none the less.
truthiness
Member
That's what I thought too, but I checked my transactions and I have both the "Humble Double Bundle" (Stacking - Humble Bundle) and the "Double Fine Pack" (Psychonauts / Costume Quest - Steam Winter Sale 2011). The latter of those purchases should qualify for the discount, but I guess they are only looking for the individual games, not any type of bundle (regardless of whether or not it was purchased directly on Steam).
This is probably a good thing though - it will keep me away from yet another Early Access game that I'll inevitably regret
.Doomshroom
Member
Looks sweet any word on a PS4 port?
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
As employees have also said in this thread, they also worked on a launch project for PS4 (a pack-in toy) and they have another unannounced project being worked on. Broken Age is purportedly releasing its first half through early access in January 2014 and its second half later. Massive Chalice is scheduled for September 2014 but I suspect this will be subject to slippage. This game is being worked on
First, given that 87,000 people or more bought Broken Age at half price already, I think it’s fair to say that for the average person who is interested in the game, it’s pretty accessible price-wise. I agree that after a period of mostly releasing smaller scope games, moving to larger, $30-tier games is different, but I think the "why" is pretty obvious. Larger scope games with larger teams and larger production values are closer to full retail products than downloadable nuggets, and so they get closer to full retail price than downloadable price. Why is Starbound more expensive than Terraria was? Why is Prison Architect more expensive than Defcon or Darwinia? Just expansion of scale, really.
As they said in interviews for years before they did the Humble livecast, Amnesia Fortnight is a thing they do where they take time off of the projects they're working on to develop some new ideas. The money they made from the Humble thing was designed to cover their costs during that period so the weren't burning through their reserve money. You can calculate their burn rate yourself. They’ve got 60-70 or so employees. The minimum cost per person is $1000 a week. How much did they make from Amnesia Fortnight? $250,000 minus Humble’s cut (default 15%) and the amount given to charity (default 20%). At defaults, that gives you $162,500. How long did the fortnight last? Well, a fortnight is 14 days. There’s your answer.
Where's Burger Adventure Presents: Pickle for President: A Hilarious Vegetable-and-Meat Themed Election Simulator? As they mentioned during the Amnesia Fortnight, they build prototypes. They don't guarantee any further release for them. Some get enough passion from the team and the right outside circumstances to make it happen, others don't. It is entirely possible that Autonomous is being worked on right now. It's also entirely possible that it isn't.
Now it's entirely possible any given team has a money problem at any given point in time, but I don't think the case can be made that because they've transitioned into Early Access funding that they necessarily have a cash problem. It's an increasing viable way to fund your game. Star Citizen is making a million bucks a week off their alpha-fund. Prison Architect is at almost a quarter-million copies sold. Starbound is coming up on $2 million and they don't even have a product you can play yet. State of Decay is at at least 100,000 copies sold Early Access. This business model is pretty obvious if you have the kind of game idea that can be developed iteratively like this.
Why do you feel they are overpriced?
And Amnesia Fortnight? That money went into making it happen and charity (it was a Humble Bundle), what else do you expect?
Autonomous was just a prototype like they had many.
truthiness
Member
Nevermind, it's working now - they fixed a bug with the pricing. http://steamcommunity.com/app/246090/discussions/0/792923684161493399/#c792923684204579102That's what I thought too, but I checked my transactions and I have both the "Humble Double Bundle" (Stacking - Humble Bundle) and the "Double Fine Pack" (Psychonauts / Costume Quest - Steam Winter Sale 2011). The latter of those purchases should qualify for the discount, but I guess they are only looking for the individual games, not any type of bundle (regardless of whether or not it was purchased directly on Steam).
This is probably a good thing though - it will keep me away from yet another Early Access game that I'll inevitably regret
a secret-boss
Banned
after watching that video. I wonder if this Star Command could have been
I agree, but the idea that they're currently running low on cash is also somewhat corroborated by the number of ports of previous games they've been releasing (BL on Steam, Costume Quest on iOS) and participation in humble bundles. It doesn't tell us if it's a desperate move to keep Broken Age & other projects afloat or just a way to secure some extra cash for the future, but I doubt they would take the time to do all of this if the company was financially healthy.
Why wouldn't they want to earn cash from older titles on other platforms? To have your games on as many platforms as possible is a good thing - have it on PC to be future proof and maybe you can also port it with little costs to next gen consoles.
It seems like they are taking steps to cut loose from publishers as much as possible and they've been doing this for years. Having games on Linux and in humble bundles is a byproduct of having full control over your game. And it also serves your independency if you have a cashflow when you are not releasing a game or not have a publisher who finances the game.
For whatever it's worth, many/most of the ports are happening because Double Fine has been aggressively working towards getting full ownership of their games back from publishers, and now has done so (most everything they've done has been publisher funded, and while Double Fine has owned the ideas and characters in the game, those publishers have owned the games themselves). Now that they own their own games again, the first way to make money on them is to get them in front of new people. Plus I think with many of these, DF wanted to do the ports originally but publishers said no (it's why DF games have only just started showing up on steam in the last year or so). I know nothing about DF's financial state, but I respect that they're trying to make sure their financial future is one which they have full control and ownership over, after a decade+ of their fate being publisher controlled.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
I'm not sure what to tell you if you actually believe participating in a bundle implies things aren't going well.
Baron_Calamity
Member
I don't think so. Negative people will be negative. Right now I'm very down on Telltale due to bugs and their unwillingness to fix them. Its not going to hurt Telltale one way or another.
CarbonatedFalcon
Member
The discount thing seems to be fixed now. Changed to $20 for me (not actually buying it myself at the moment, but still).
So if you're interested and were having issues before check now.
So if you're interested and were having issues before check now.
Are any of those considered to be high quality games? I know, for me, none of them either a) appealed to me or b) were good enough to spend time on. I'd be surprised if any of them got even an 80 on metacritic, and for the most part I haven't heard overwhelming positive feedback on gaf or anywhere else for even one of those games.
WhiskeyKnight
Member
In the Broken Age documentary Tim and others explicitly state they are releasing ports to help fund Broken Age.
maniac-kun
Member
Metacrtic: Psyconauts: 87%
Brutal Legend: 83%
morningbus
Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Your mistake was taking him seriously. Reread the end of his post again.
However, I do admit that it got me to look up the scores for their games and I am shocked that Costume Quest is one of their lowest rated.
Chris Remo
Member
Broken Age is coming out in 2014. Part 1 will be out in very early 2014, currently targeting January. Massive Chalice doesn't have a firm release date but we are also targeting 2014 for that game. Spacebase is intended to be developed as long as the community shows enthusiasm and it keeps selling, so it's hard to say exactly when it will be "done," because ideally we'll keep adding to it for a while.
As far as pricing, one of the great things about the marketplace on PC with platforms like Steam and Humble is that they allow for great price elasticity. We recognize that not everyone wants to pay for an Alpha build of a gamebut we also recognize that there are players who enjoy getting their hands on the game this early in the process. We will do our best to make it worth their while by sharing details of development along the way and examining feedback honestly. And Broken Age is available at two price points, one of which is a simple preorder and the other of which offers a huge amount of visibility into the development process, with many hours of documentary footage and dev diary materials.
Some people will just want to play the game; but many others Broken Age backers tell us they feel they ripped us off by only paying $30 and getting the enormous amount of additional materials we've already delivered. We hear that all the time. Different strokes, right?
The money from Amnesia Fortnight went directly into Amnesia Fortnight. It actually didn't entirely cover Amnesia Fortnight; we funded the rest ourselves. It's as simple as that. Usually, AF is paid for entirely by us, so we are enormously thankful to our community for helping us bear that cost this time around (and, again, hopefully the many hours of amazing 2 Player Productions documentary footage and other materials made it worth their while)!
As for Autonomous, well, we'd love to make that game, and all the other prototypes. But funding and developing games is very complex, and we don't want to make a deal that won't ultimately let us maintain proper control as developers, so we have to be careful about it. These things are complicated and in many case very time-consuming.
Double Fine actually isn't in deep trouble, but we are an independent company trying to become even more independent, and that's hard. It means we can't always do everything we want as soon as we'd like towe'd love to have all our current projects all finished now and on sale, plus all the other AF prototypes, etc.! But we employ 60 people, and every single project that we take on has to be balanced against how those 60 people are going to stay employed with their talents being put to good use; some projects make more sense at a given moment than other projects, based on any number of interconnected factors.
Sometimes games take longer than expected, which is a bummer, but any studio on the planet will tell you the same thing. We're trying to be much more transparent with our development process, but that also means that folks are going to be aware of things like delays more than they would be with a studio that doesn't even tell you the game is in development until it's already had its first delay. So it goes.
We're going through a transition period right now. Even though Double Fine has always been an independent company, in the past we funded many of our games through traditional publishing arrangements. We are trying to keep that a part of our past, not our future. But that means we have to get a lot more creative about how we fund, develop, and market our games. It means our development cycles are a little rougher around the edges; but it also means our community gets to see behind the curtain a lot more, and it has allowed us to branch out into genres and gametypes we never would have been able to make before. We think the positives ultimately far outweigh the negatives. It's already been a pretty wild ride.
Azure Dream
Member
I'm not validating him, but to be fair, THQ's Humble Bundle was a bit of a "Something's wrong here" moment.
EA made one too, I better sell my stocks!
The only reason THQ bundle was suspect it´s because we already knew they were in trouble.
Not saying it for you Azure, but it´s pretty sad that every DF thread is becoming a kind of morale battle about how much people trust DF or how much they are going to fail. I suspect by the (excellent) post of Chris that he must feel quite tired of hearing stuff like this.
I may jump into this, it was my favorite Amnesia concept.
Azure Dream
Member
THQ's came first. And you're right, we did know they were in trouble, but they were still talking a big talk at the time.
But trust me, I'm not making an correlation between that situation and Double-Fine's current one. I'm just saying there was a moment in the past where a humble-style bundle was indeed a cause for added suspicion.
Baron_Calamity
Member
Funny, makers of that crappy phone game Star Command are hinting that Double Fine is copying them. https://www.facebook.com/StarCommandGame
I hope they aren't being serious
I hope they aren't being serious
Oh you are kidding me. Why would they copy that pile of crap? (speaking as someone who kickstarted that damn game twice)
OK, I see from the Facebook that they're trying to somehow say that DF have been inspired by Star Command, not that they've copied. "A very similar concept" ... lol. Except DF9 doesn't have utterly ridiculous minigames, nor the incredibly dull waiting around doing nothing while weapons charge. And the almost complete absence of any other depth to the game. Yeah. (OK, I'm probably just a little bitter after having kickstarted Star Command twice for it to have lived up to so little of what they promised).
Messofanego
Banned
Is this the thread for impressions? Is there going to be an |OT| or is this it?
I'm really liking it, even though I'm new to these kind of games. The menus are slick, and I like just using the keyboard shortcuts. I realised you have to keep rooms separate, as beds can only be in a designated residence area. Also, don't put doors near airlock rooms because for some reason then workers don't get back to mining.
The Double Fine charm is here in the writing and character interactions.
The Spaceface is a brilliant idea.
I guess some people just prefer sleeping on the floor.
Fitness freak...
Ok, this fitness thing has gone too far! Space teabagging is not cool!
Don't fret Wii U owners, Nintendo still got your back in space!
Gotta admit, hipsters do have good taste in music
Chill the fuck out, chicken alien panicking about oxygen, put a helmet on.
Ok, Spaceface just got creepy...
I'm really liking it, even though I'm new to these kind of games. The menus are slick, and I like just using the keyboard shortcuts. I realised you have to keep rooms separate, as beds can only be in a designated residence area. Also, don't put doors near airlock rooms because for some reason then workers don't get back to mining.
The Double Fine charm is here in the writing and character interactions.
The Spaceface is a brilliant idea.
I guess some people just prefer sleeping on the floor.
Fitness freak...
Ok, this fitness thing has gone too far! Space teabagging is not cool!
Don't fret Wii U owners, Nintendo still got your back in space!
Gotta admit, hipsters do have good taste in music
Chill the fuck out, chicken alien panicking about oxygen, put a helmet on.
Ok, Spaceface just got creepy...
They were quick putting that in a better way:
In these day you must be SO careful to say anything, it´s stressing.
Sure! I was more commenting in a "following the conversation" way, I know you didn't make that correlation, just pointing something.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
In case it's not a troll post
Here's me putting Costume Quest on my GOTY 2010 ballot:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=25261431&postcount=1303
Here's me putting Stacking on my GOTY 2011 ballot:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=34371738&postcount=1571
Here's me mentioning Psychonauts in my late-to-the-party great games I played in 2012 ballot:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46493011&postcount=1282
Here's Metacritic:
Mikado
Gold Member
Chill the fuck out, chicken alien panicking about oxygen, put a helmet on.
/dead.
This game looks adorable.
Played a few hours of this last night (which was actually a lot more hours than I'd intended to, so I guess mission accomplished on being compelling) and had a pretty great time.
Pretty much all of my issues at this stage stem from weird AI. The most common ones I ran into:
• Technicians working out/playing games/drinking while the air scrubbers break down/catch on fire
• Security teams continuing to explore derelict ships (or just wander around) while the base is under attack (even with the beacon cleared)
• Technicians just being kinda crap at their jobs
• People sleeping at weird, irregular times (might be cool if we could assign people to night or day shifts, meaning we could ensure that there's always people awake to do their jobs)
I'm guessing a lot of these are already on the to-do list.
One feature I'd really like to see added would be an Emergency Procedure kinda deal. It'd be sweet if we could hit a button when the station is under attack that would immediately recall all security officers to the attack site, and maybe even rally the civillians to a designated "panic room".
I've been seeing this a lot, with the game alerting me that people are sleeping on the floor when:
A) I can't actually see anyone sleeping on the floor
B) There's half a dozen empty beds
Pretty much all of my issues at this stage stem from weird AI. The most common ones I ran into:
• Technicians working out/playing games/drinking while the air scrubbers break down/catch on fire
• Security teams continuing to explore derelict ships (or just wander around) while the base is under attack (even with the beacon cleared)
• Technicians just being kinda crap at their jobs
• People sleeping at weird, irregular times (might be cool if we could assign people to night or day shifts, meaning we could ensure that there's always people awake to do their jobs)
I'm guessing a lot of these are already on the to-do list.
One feature I'd really like to see added would be an Emergency Procedure kinda deal. It'd be sweet if we could hit a button when the station is under attack that would immediately recall all security officers to the attack site, and maybe even rally the civillians to a designated "panic room".
I guess some people just prefer sleeping on the floor.
I've been seeing this a lot, with the game alerting me that people are sleeping on the floor when:
A) I can't actually see anyone sleeping on the floor
B) There's half a dozen empty beds
Heh. But what's with the purple spacesuited dude floating through the walls?Chill the fuck out, chicken alien panicking about oxygen, put a helmet on.
This is supposed to indicate that that character is moving UNDER the structure. The animation and newer visual indicator is not in yet, so it's just them going through it with a purple highlight. It is supposed to have some sort of outline and an animation where the character is actually moving to go under the structure so it looks more natural and then gives a more subtle and slightly more refined looking highlight or glow. So almost the entire thing is not final for that specific situation.
I imagine each game has a separate budget.
One big problem I'm having with the game is I'll put down a bed in construction, and then put a television or something near it, and after I hit construct the bed vanishes because the game thinks it's blocking the space, but in the game it doesn't look like that at all. Which would not be a huge problem, except there doesn't seem to be any way to cancel objects after they're confirmed but before they're built. Erase does nothing on them. Since I only know if the bed will vanish after I've confirmed it makes things a little awkward. Instead, I have to have the beds confirmed and built before I place any other objects anywhere near them.
Star Command is actually a pretty decent game.. well maybe half of a game, but theres fun to be had in it
notoriousKTR
Member
Spacebase looks great. Will keep on eye on its development. We got this and Clockwork Empires?!? Awesome.
morningbus
Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Okay, admit it, how poorly xeroxed is your conspiracy theory literature?
I guess I must have imagined all those team-stream videos documenting the development of Massive Chalice that Double Fine have uploaded on Youtube then.
I can't believe this has to be said, but the games will each have their own budget. There isn't just a massive pool of money that each team draws from however they want to.
Really? You're going to have conspiracy about a project that gets constant updates? I think you're just looking for an excuse to bitch.
http://blog.massivechalice.com/