It turns out that Double Fine didn’t exactly make a profit off of its well-known Kickstarter project Broken Age . Considered to be the game that ushered in the era of Kickstarter, Broken Age raised 3.3 million dollars which, at the time, was the most any game had raised on a crowdfunding platform. Unfortunately, 3.3 million dollars wasn’t quite enough for Double Fine’s vision, even though this total was way, way above the total they asked for, which was only $400,000.
As a result, Double Fine pumped a lot more money into the project, which means it had to make sales in order to turn a profit. Except most of their sales were made through Kickstarter and thus were part of the first three million that they made. Thus, the game is struggling just to break even.
“My expectation with Broken Age in the end was just to break even,” Tim Schafer said in the video. “With Kickstarter, the risk is gone of losing money on it, so you know you’ve broken even if you just make the game to that amount of money. But we made it [for], like, twice as much almost as we got in. Or more. So we will just about make that back.”
Even so, Tim said that the experience was mostly positive and does mean good things for the world of game design, especially as we learn how to manage our crowdsourced funds better. “The biggest change is that we don’t need the publishers anymore,” he explained. “It used to be [that there was] no money in the world outside of publishers, and I think crowdfunding is here to stay, I think it’s hopefully going to grow. In my dream world it would be big enough to fund AAA games and it would be the way we fund all games going forward.”
Source: Double Fine