Adventure Gamers - Forums

OrionO - 13 April 2014 05:08 AM

Davey, we should criticize what deserves criticism, and praise what deserves praise.

Absolutely, and Tim Schafer’s has addressed and answered some of the criticism - if you watch the documentary, you’ll see him doing just that. But hate mails (such as the example given, and yep, there were lots of others) are a different matter. Writing

Pathetic to see Schafer dismiss all the criticism directed at him as “hate.”

is simply totally inaccurate and does Schafer a grave disservice. If you made such a statement purely based on one magazine article, maybe you should get a rounder picture.

OrionO - 13 April 2014 05:37 AM

He says there are a bunch of people who hate the idea of what he is doing. The implication is that he made a single mistake and all of these hateful people, who had been waiting patiently in silence, finally got their opportunity to pounce. Nowhere in the article does it quote Schafer as acknowledging the validity of any of those criticizing him.

Of course, maybe he said much more to the reporter and admitted deserving much of the criticism, but those quotes didn’t get printed. Who knows. It is good to know that, at other times, he fessed up to many mistakes.

Their mistake in this particular case was that the game ended up having a bigger scope than originally intended and they had to invest a lot of their own money and and break the game in two parts to be able to finance it until the end (which tuned out to be a successful choice). There’s certainly ground for criticism here but people claiming that schaffer stole their money and is asking for more, that he betrayed them, that the whole project is a failure etc. isn’t what I would call criticism.
You’re right though, in that particular quote he doesn’t acknowledge that along with all these comments there were also some valid criticisms and maybe he is referring to those too. I guess maybe it’s just me assuming the best of him and you assuming the worst Probably the truth is somewhere down the middle, nobody is perfect after all.

Karlok - 13 April 2014 06:07 AM

DaveyB - 13 April 2014 04:02 AM

What? You agree with this ludicrous statement???

In your case it’s always advisable to add: Please do not put words in my mouth. Thank you.

You’re welcome. But considering you wrote “I also agree with OrionO.” I don’t really think I’m putting words in your mouth though lol.

But for a person who wrote:

Karlok - 13 April 2014 04:31 AM

@DaveyB. Please don’t try to start another discussion with me. You and are are through talking.

you’re making a very good job of continuing talking. Ciao.

jaap - 13 April 2014 07:02 AM

in the latest documentary episode they revealed the sales numbers:
“as of march 29, broken age has sold 70,947 units and grossed $1,674,082”
I wonder how that amount compares to the KS budget they got after all expenses. (although they also put in their own money into the game)
the good thing is that the engine etc has been made, therefore episode 2 won’t cost as much as ep 1.

The impression given by the documentary is that the sales figures were around what they expected - neither disasterous, but not as good as they’d hoped for ideally either. Of course, one of the problems with Kickstarter is that some of the more or less guaranteed sales with a “normal” game aren’t going to happen as these people are already backers & so getting the game. But as the documentary also refers to, Tim Schafer’s games are also typically “slow-burners” i.e. sell steadily over a longer period.

What would be interesting is what the typical sales are for DF products and other comparable adventures over the same sort of time frame, but as companies aren’t normally as open with their sales figures as DF are being with the documentary, I guess that’s hard to tell. Inevitably, there will be the “doomsday scenario” people who state that these figures are really poor, but unless they give a means for comparison, it’s hard to tell. We also don’t fully know how much money DF actually put into the project themselves. Anything above that is pure profit, though the costs for the 2nd part of the game have to be accounted for.

I’m not sure why some people expect DF to have already done much on the 2nd part of the game, when up to release date the first part was being worked on and the documentary doesn’t cover much time after that. Nor why some people think much of the first part was scraped - exactly the point of the split into 2 parts was that not much had to be scraped.

Gone Home sold 50,000 copies in about a month, for what it’s worth. Broken Age costs $5 more, but has Tim and Double Fine’s name behind it, not to mention the big build-up. They’re completely different games, of course, but that’s the raw data. It’s interesting, though, because Gone Home got a lot of buzz with mainstream media for being something new, while Broken Age’s return to an “old” genre didn’t really work in its favour (it would seem).

Gone Home has sold about 250,000 copies now and it was only made by a handful of people…now there’s a compelling argument to become an indie developer and try something different.

orient - 13 April 2014 08:09 AM

Gone Home sold 50,000 copies in about a month, for what it’s worth.

Interesting - thanks for the info. Puts it pretty much on a fairly even footing with Broken Age then - with 70,000 in 2 months, presumably less in 2nd month than first. But as you say, Gone Home had advantages that:
1) Broken Age costs $5 more (so revenue would be more in favour of Broken Age)
2) Gone Home got a lot of buzz with mainstream media for being something new, and
3) Broken Age has 90,000 people it can’t sell to as they’re already backers!

Shows Broken Age’s sales figures up in a decent enough light if you ask me.

orient - 13 April 2014 08:09 AM

Gone Home has sold about 250,000 copies now and it was only made by a handful of people…now there’s a compelling argument to become an indie developer and try something different.

No question about that lol.

Tad - 13 April 2014 08:13 AM

Not to sound harsh, but I really fail to see how Broken Age cost as much as it did.

Not to sound harsh, but I struggle to understand this kind of comment. They had a skilled, experienced team of ca. 15 people working on it for ca. 2years. What do you think their salaries should be?  A start-up developer where the people involved are working more or less for free is one thing, but here it’s full-time people. What do you expect to earn a year?

Now for sure, as has been commented, one whole problem with the DF “Adventure” Kickstarter & pitch was that Tim hadn’t even thought through the game initially and so there was lots of work going on before the design was actually finalised, and so no doubt a lot of wastage occured there compared to an average game. But this was the whole concept of the original kickstarter as presented.

^ I think that the fact that only half the game is released so far is also something to take into account when looking at the sales.

DaveyB - 13 April 2014 08:49 AM

Not to sound harsh, but I struggle to understand this kind of comment. They had a skilled, experienced team of ca. 15 people working on it for ca. 2years. What do you think their salaries should be?  A start-up developer where the people involved are working more or less for free is one thing, but here it’s full-time people. What do you expect to earn a year?

To me, this herein is part of the problem with how some companies are using Kickstarter. Should an existing company really expect to be able to pay full salaries for 15 experienced individuals based on the money they raise via crowdfunding?

Can we contrast this with Tex Murphy? They had nowhere near the same amount of money, but additional to all the gameplay had to film and edit hours and hours of really top quality FMV - and completed it in half the time - so why has DF struggled so much? Financial mismanagement? Or to contrast this with any other crowd funded adventure game - Is the main difference that the DF team were working full time with regular salaries as their actual dayjob?

OrionO - 13 April 2014 05:08 AM

Regarding Schafer’s comments, I usually find him agreeable, so it was disappointing to see him go the “haters!” route. That someone was able to find one tweet (out of how many?) doesn’t mean the negative reaction to his October announcement was based on “hate”, as the article “Schafer: How to stay afloat in ‘a pool of Internet Twitter hate’” suggests. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-02-21-tim-schafer-how-to-stay-afloat-in-a-pool-of-internet-twitter-hate

First, I didn’t cherrypick the tweet to blow out of proportion what happened. I specifically screengrabbed that one because the response made me chuckle. And I did it back then when it happened.

Anyway, because I have so much time on my hands I looked up the tweets again around that time. The rest isn’t straight up insulting like the one I posted, but they are very misinformed and do insinuate bad intentions. I guess in mass those seem bad enough. Most of them don’t seem hateful, but I guess if you’re caught be surprise by them and have to explain again and again that you’re not asking for more money and that the backers were informed of the situation all along, then it does drag one down. There’s this guy who asked for a refund of the 1$ he backed the Kickstarter campaign with, purely for “symbolic reasons”. He got his refund.
Was that trolling? The request seemed sincere to me, which wouldn’t make it trolling. I think, when I look back at it, I don’t see so much trolling as self-righteous misinformed anger by some people. Which is bad enough, but it isn’t trolling. At least not under a narrow definition, which would be knowingly, purposefully behaving in a shitty manner to get a rise out of people.

Gosh, is it tedious to go that far back in the Twitter timeline. Is there an easier way than to always scroll to the bottom of the page and wait for more tweets to load, rinse and repeat?

Edit: The tweets of 1$ refund guy:

Enough of the Twitter sleuthing for me for now, I have stuff to do.