toblix

Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight 2012

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With the whole new crowd-funding thing people seem on edge, eagerly/fearfully waiting for what seems like the inevitable company or person that scams everyone and pulls a legit Kangaroo Jack, or perhaps worse, subverts the short-term goodwill of the public for their shady and cynical business model.

Even the appearance of impropriety -- caused by misunderstanding the purpose of a thing for example -- can set off some peoples stressed hair trigger. It's an interesting quirk, and I think we'll see more of it as the crowd-funding phenomenon grows.

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Oh, man.. I hope people aren't actually expecting Double Fine to go make those games now.. like a full game? Surely it's clear that this is all just for these couple of weeks of prototyping, not any full product or anything..

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My one concern at the moment is that they won't be fun games to play. I base this worry entirely on Stacking (I own the other games, I just haven't played them yet): It looked awesome, it was a neat idea, but the puzzles were pretty boring.

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With regard to managing expectations, I think it would've been a good idea to give away the older Amnesia Bundle games (Brazen, Happy Song, and Costume Quest). That way potential contributors could play them and get a rough idea of what to expect for the current batch of prototypes.

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When it's pay what you want and they are clearly labeled prototypes, I don't think DoubleFine owes a whole lot to the customers. Some or all of the prototypes may not be fun. It's why you make prototypes.

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I think asking for money in exchange for video games is pretty much why Double Fine exists as a company. Seeing as that's what video game companies do. I suppose if you're sketchy about the idea of preorders in general then yeah this might look bad but Double Fine is hardly the first game to ask you to pay for a game before it's done. The latest XCOM unlocked 3 tiers of rewards based on how many people preordered it!

I would say this is different from preorders. This and the Kickstarter (like most Kickstarters) seem to be you buying the idea of a game and some concept art (in the case of Kickstarters you also usually get sold a developers name). Preorders tend to be for games that are much further along in development, to the point where you know what it will look and play like.

Part of it is the ability to vote, too.

Thinking about it more I feel like this is the reason they went the paying route. It seems like a good way to stop spam, similar to how Valve is now running Greenlight from a developers standpoint (pay to get listed). And I can't imagine DF is getting a lot of money from from this, which can make it a better or worse move depending on how you look at it.

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And I can't imagine DF is getting a lot of money from from this, which can make it a better or worse move depending on how you look at it.

They raised 140 000USD in one week.

Let's say a 25% of that goes to Humble Bundle and charity(default split on the main page), so 105 000 remains.

From what I saw in the first meeting live-streams, there are about 50 people involved in AF full-time; which means 2100 USD raised per people involved.

Doing a very rough estimation from Gamasutra 2012 survey, a 'Video game' employee earns on average 80 000 US per year which is about 1500 USD per week.

So, all in all, in one week, the raised enough to cover 70% of the direct cost of Amnesia Fortnight.

I'm sure it's not the core reason for which they decided to go with that format, but I wouldn't say that it's 'not a lot of money'.

It will probably pay for itself in the end, which is brilliant.

In any case, even if there was no Humble Bundle, AF would still be one of the raddest initiative. I wish more studio would join... wouldn't it be great if there was a simultaneous AF across the industry?

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They raised 140 000USD in one week.

Let's say a 25% of that goes to Humble Bundle and charity(default split on the main page), so 105 000 remains.

From what I saw in the first meeting live-streams, there are about 50 people involved in AF full-time; which means 2100 USD raised per people involved.

Doing a very rough estimation from Gamasutra 2012 survey, a 'Video game' employee earns on average 80 000 US per year which is about 1500 USD per week.

So, all in all, in one week, the raised enough to cover 70% of the direct cost of Amnesia Fortnight.

I'm sure it's not the core reason for which they decided to go with that format, but I wouldn't say that it's 'not a lot of money'.

It will probably pay for itself in the end, which is brilliant.

In any case, even if there was no Humble Bundle, AF would still be one of the raddest initiative. I wish more studio would join... wouldn't it be great if there was a simultaneous AF across the industry?

Your calculation only included salary. Didn't include health benefits, rent, utilities, food, IT, etc. A employee costs a lot more than their salary. I bet they funded half at most, or maybe a third of the two weeks of the Amnesia jam with that money. The rest is surely coming out of pocket for the company because this isn't publisher or otherwise backed.

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It seemed like a weird thing to raise money for. In general I am comfortable with Kickstarters, but I was definitely not at home enough with what the money was being raised for in the Amnesia Fortnight to consider contributing. Was the idea basically to pay to have input into the experimental direction of the company? Or did people view it more as paying for prototypes? Especially confusing because it seems like the Fortnight/end products would exist regardless of how much money was raised by Double Fine in this; they didn't need the money to justify the products.

That's not to say I don't think it should exist; if people want to contribute it's fine and good. And the public prototyping is wonderful. Just don't fully understand it myself.

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I'm sure it's not the core reason for which they decided to go with that format, but I wouldn't say that it's 'not a lot of money'.

I suppose I was basing what I said more off of what they got for the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter, which is a bad measurement on my part. The DF Adventure is (I assume) a much larger and longer project then the AF stuff so it makes sense it would need a larger budget. Maybe I am just a little cynical because as a non-backer of the Adventure I haven't heard a single thing about it in the press, and now they come out with a similar shtick...

I do generally like the idea of the AF and agree with the sentiment that if more companies did something like this it would be awesome. That said, the idea of a whole company dropping what it is doing for two weeks and working on something unrelated sounds like a great way to mess up a work flow.

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It seemed like a weird thing to raise money for. In general I am comfortable with Kickstarters, but I was definitely not at home enough with what the money was being raised for in the Amnesia Fortnight to consider contributing. Was the idea basically to pay to have input into the experimental direction of the company? Or did people view it more as paying for prototypes? Especially confusing because it seems like the Fortnight/end products would exist regardless of how much money was raised by Double Fine in this; they didn't need the money to justify the products.

That's not to say I don't think it should exist; if people want to contribute it's fine and good. And the public prototyping is wonderful. Just don't fully understand it myself.

Mh, I am rather confused as to why there is any confusion at all. It was pay-what-you-want with clearly labelled benefits - ability to vote, old and new prototypes, stream and summery-videos - for those who joined. My, that sounds wonderful - 123,45 $. Cool, but I'm poor - 1 $. Not interested - 0 $. And actually it doesn't matter how many people pay how much, because that is not the point, but money is still cool, and as Chris said, the pay-wall weeds out the spam. Pretty clear, pretty simple, in my eyes, and not at all sinister or questionable.

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I guess I don't see them as asking for Amnesia Fortnight money as necessarily a bad thing. If I recall you had to only give at least $1 to vote, and even though you could have given all of your money either to charity or Humble Bundle dudes.

Plus either I saw a video or read an interview explaining that the reasoning for charging was partly to get serious votes only. I suppose you could argue against it, but in a way, I don't think I will mind any of my favorite developers doing things like this in the future. Maybe because I work in games now I see things from the other side and how hard it is to gather money from fans, even directly, so this kind of upfront support makes me excited for future business models.

To be completely honest though I wouldn't have bothered voting if I weren't getting their prototypes as an incentive since I trust some good games will come out of it no matter what. Besides I probably owe a little bit for buying Psychonauts used long ago and waiting until a Black Friday sale to buy Brutal Legend. I am a rude gamer.

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Your calculation only included salary. Didn't include health benefits, rent, utilities, food, IT, etc. A employee costs a lot more than their salary. I bet they funded half at most, or maybe a third of the two weeks of the Amnesia jam with that money. The rest is surely coming out of pocket for the company because this isn't publisher or otherwise backed.

.

You're right, in hindsight, that was a pretty simplistic cost evaluation.

So yes, so far, it's not a lot of money; but I'd say being able to cover a third of the cost isn't a negligible side-effect either.

Anyway, I didn't have any hesitation in paying for this; because it felt like championing creativity, boldness and openness of process and I think the industry need more of those.

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I ended up backing it post-voting process, once I found out I'd have access to the documentary stuff.

Enjoyed trying out the Brazen prototype as well, though taking on Monster Hunter is bold.

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Yeah, I'm on a Mac so I wasn't going to back it. But Episode 0 convinced me to go ahead and buy access to the rest! It's so exciting to see behind the scenes at DF. Looks like such a brilliant place to work at and all the project leads sound so excited to get a chance to do their prototype. Great stuff.

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The longer this whole thing goes on the more I'm amused that Tim Schafer managed to wangle a camera crew to do whatever goofy shit he wants.

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The Day 5 video has a hilarious recording session with Camden (I think his name is?) doing a Brooklyn Garbage Man robot voice.

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I watched all the videos yesterday and they're all great. Makes me want to make something myself.

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Just watched AF livestream, and I want Spacebase and Autonomous. It made me realize that dev studios are collections of people with different ideas more than single-minded game-making machines, and that made me consider my own job in a new light.

Also wish I had a job at DF. I wonder if they need an on-site tailor?

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Did Spacebase come together? It looked, from Friday, like Dungeon Keeper in space but without a point. From the videos, it looked like JP was letting everyone get their pet idea into the game but not actually getting it to a point where it was fun. I'm particularly curious to know if there's any kind of resource constraint - most of these kind of games have you trying to set up an economy and push past the existing limitations, but I wasn't seeing that at all in the videos.

It did look like Black Lake was getting somewhere; it had a lot of issues from the videos but the team knew where they were so I'm hoping they came together. We'll see if it's any good, I guess. Autonomous looks rad, White Birch looks pretty rad considering they don't have the five years it takes Team Ico to do something similar, Hack and Slash looks possibly a bit janky but at worse it'll be Double Fine Zelda and there is nothing wrong with that.

So yeah, Spacebase was the only one that looked like it had significant problems from the summary videos, which is a little awkward.

Edit: I guess there's livestream videos? Lemme find out.

Edit to the edit: hmm, I think the building towards derelicts and asteroids/cost for salvaging in terms of lost resources works nicely as a gameplay loop. So I guess the videos were a tad misleading.

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I only saw Space Base and Black Lake so fur but had the same impression. Nothing about Space Base seemed awfully interesting so far, but then that might be a general issue with prototyping that type of game -- you probably can't really make a very interesting prototype without all the interacting systems and you can't put them all into a prototype.

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I looked at the video for a bit and Hack'n'Slash actually seems really good. Maybe that's just because I'm a programmer.

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