Hopefully Broken sword 5 comes pretty soon and without these kind of announcements.

Many things are entertaining. Watching funny cat videos is entertaining, but people did not pay Double Fine to watch funny videos. Getting funny videos is nice to bridge the time, but ultimately people will want to see what they payed money for. I'd even go so far as to say that most backers would have preferred to get the game as promised and no status updates instead of getting status updates but no game. Of course it would be best to get both, but ultimately people will prefer the thing they payed money for.

Or, if you want to stick with entertainment, how about going to a concert and getting stand up comedy instead? It might be entertaining, bt it is not what you payed money for. Entertainment is as much of of a craftmanship as an other business.

Still missing the point:

That's the main reason why you can't compare building an house to crowdfunding a videogame.

By the way, did you backed? I guess not. you would be less angry if you had cookies.

But they can't make it without money.

Actually no, I don't think that this is obvious. The idea of a 300k game was what all those people subscribed for. I know, those were much more people than expected, hence the larger amount of money, but each of them wanted a 300k game. That's why they backed that kickstarter project. So why not give it to them?

Instead of a 300k game they have no game at all now. How could that be better?

Those are very wise words--an excellent argument against freedom. With Freedom comes decadence and no structure.

EXACTLY!

You can get a feel for a person and their company by the videos provided. It is important not only to listen to what they say, but HOW they say it, and do they look descent. I have backed Wasteland 2 and other projects like it (which are doing quite well)

Do they display confidence? Are they concrete? Do they have a vision? Are they explicit? Do they look responsible? Do they carry themselves?

It is not so much as everything has to be "lockdown"....

When you watch Double Fine's video, they had no vision, no real confidence, etc. It seemed like they were just there "just to see" if they could make it happen. It was also they the way they carried themselves. They looked like a bunch of creative people which their comical videos showed. However, that's it. Tim seemed to be a person with no structure or discipline. He didn't symbolize it.

Massive Chalice was even worst (look before at my post on it).

I think much of this has to do with intuition, which is a gift, that many backers do not have unfortunately.

That's called cognitive dissonance. The reason I don't back anything on Kickstarter is exactly because I know someone will sooner or later pull this kind of BS and I will have blown my money on nothing.

Indeed, kickstarter is letting us see that the "big bad publishers" really aren't all that bad with all of their oversight and deadlines.

They've had to deal with developers like Double Fine for years and know how to crack the whip, when to cut their losses and drop the project entirely, or when to just launch the game into the public regardless of it being up to the developers vision.

I've certainly gained a new appreciation for the big publishers thanks to kickstarter.

Do you actually think Double Fine are filing for bankruptcy as we speak?

They have money to finish this game. They may have disappointed many fans who really wanted to see the game soon (myself included), but there's a long way from changing direction in a project to the level of mismanagement that leads to total failure to deliver and/or bankruptcy.

For the record, the Kickstarter money has not been entirely spent yet. Maybe about 75% of it - rough estimate based on numbers released to backers weeks ago - the rest of the money comes from other sources, that, I assume, have already been locked in.

Publishers have never been the problem. So many games have been funded due to publishers who take all the risk. Being a video game publishers is essentially venture funding. Of course they're going to want oversight over the projects. It's incorrect to think that publishers just pull the plug on games if the developers can't deliver as agreed upon. The key for the publisher is to minimize risk. Minimizing risk may require further investment so that a game can actually get made.

So yeah, even if a publisher had funded this, they would probably have chosen to extend the funding rather than pull the plug, realizing the game had good enough sales potential if the developers were allowed to continue with their vision to an acceptable degree.

Flip side, cut out publishers and expect to see the developers take the project in the direction they would like. This is what Double Fine has done. They never promised to take the project in the direction that you, or any other backer, would like.

I'm very excited to see what this game will end up in, although I agree it's a damn long wait.

This does no such thing. Even with publishers there have been games that went over budget and were behind schedule. But, most of the time they would cancel the project or have it shipped in a buggy and incomplete format before allowing it to turn into a complete boondoggle.

I think that Spore is a good example, I'm not sure about bugs, but they substantially cut the scope between what they were originally promising and what was eventually delivered.

DNF had a publisher eventually, and they cut the scope on that particular game quite a bit to get it released.

What publishers do that KS campaigns don't, is require the developer to convince a 3rd party that they're making a game that's popular enough to warrant the risk. By taking the funding request directly to the people, there's a greater degree of freedom of topic and approach that you wouldn't necessarily see with a publisher.

In this case, it sounds like Double Fine was previously relying upon the publisher to tell them when the scope was too big and that they'd have to cut back or receive no further funding. It sounds more like a failure of the people designing and running the project to say "no" often enough to keep it on budget. (A similar problem led to DNF being so far off schedule)

I think there's something up with your post. You say that publishers never were the problem, and then you say that publishers want developers to take the project in the direction that the publisher would like. In many cases that has been the problem.

But, anyways, regardless of what happens, I'm going to be really curious to see what this train wreck turns into. It might be more fun than the game, but I hope not.

No I don't think that they are filling for bankruptcy, but they stated that they have money only to finish episode 1:

"Clearly, any overages were going to have to be paid by Double Fine, with our own money from the sales of our other games. That actually makes a lot of sense and we feel good about it. We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough. "

and

"We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development."

So if episode 1 fail (hopefully it won't happen), they won't have money to finish the rest of the game. I wish them luck and I hope they will manage to deliver both episodes, but I don't support their decisions.

I'm only concerned about this because I love idea of Kickstarter. Thanks to it we will see a lot of classic RPGs with tactical combat and I really love them. Because I like Kickstarer, I'm concerned about every 'shady' actions taken by devs of project funded via Kickstarter, as I'm afraid that it will hurt crowd funding.

The other sources are what they made from the Humble Double Fine Bundle, individual sales from their old games on digital stores, and the pennies they receive from the sales of Psychonauts Steam Trading cards. In the future they are also counting on the money from Steam Early Access sales of Broken Age (which is doubtful to be a significant amount). That's it.
Tim already said they won't make another KS and they won't look for publisher funding. I'm sure as hell they won't ask a bank for a loan either unless it's the last resource.
So no, they are not filing for bankruptcy but they are counting on money that may not come.

That's a very rosy way of looking at things. Publishers will, at the very least, end up with a new IP, possibly new tech. At most, they'll eat up the developer, all their assets, code, and IPs. Publishing contracts can be extremely predatory and the publisher can further manipulate the development by delaying royalties, forcing the studio into concessions and debt.