It is old news now that Double Fine went with Kickstarter. But we are going to not only tell you what happened, but explain how and why their Kickstarter became such a massive success.
A massively successful Kickstarter
You can check out their Kickstarter here. At the time of this writing, their current total was $1,403,688. This is much, much more than the original $400,000 they were aiming for.
Double Fine History lesson
Double Fine released an amazing game once up on a time. It was called Psychonauts. It was incredible and brilliant with great controls and an even better story. The environment popped with color and life. It was everything a great game should be and Psychonauts is still one of the greatest games ever made. It was also a dismal failure upon initial release.
Only quite a bit later did it get the acclaim it needed. By then Double fine was making Brutal Legend, which was very good but not as great as Psychonauts. At this point, things started to look bleak for them. While they had done okay, they were not making as much money as they should have. They also did various other games such as the less-than-great Costume Quest and Stacking. Those games, despite not being on their normal level of quality, sold well enough to be successes.
An uncertain future
Being a third party developer is rocky without a stable publisher. THQ is less than stable right now, and they could not count on EA. While there is no confirmation of why, there had been many people in the community urging them to make Psychonauts 2, such as Notch. There were also others bringing up Kickstarter and other programs.
How and why they were a massive success at Kickstarter
The sympathy and credibility that they had built up from Psychonauts paid them back 100 fold. People from all over the industry supported their Kickstarter with money and publicity. On top of that, Kickstarter is a donation so they can come out paying less taxes on the donations.
This gives them or any developer extra money to work with. Let this be a lesson to other developers, dedication to a good product can pay off down the line. As a result they broke overall records and made an incredible amount of money. This is a Cinderella story of a publisher finally getting what they deserve, and an inspiration to us all.
Moving on up
From here they are going to develop a Double Fine Adventure. And who knows what will come next? If this does well we may even see Psychonauts 2 at some point. Now they have the funding to do whatever they need on their next game. We always thought it was a shame that Double Fine had not received their just due, but now they have it in spades. It is only going to get better from here.
