Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[felipepepe]

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna’s Breakout, Harvey’s New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav’s Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we’d do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it’s alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

If armchair designers talk bad about Broken Age, they are wrong cause they never made a game before. If the fucking founder of Daedalic points out how bad Broken Age is, he is now a slave driver. Also, note that they are speaking out of their asses. The guy that starts all this rumor does it based on the fact that Daedalic's JOBS page was only hiring interims:

Hate to burst your bubble, but it’s more than just a rumor that as much as 80% of Daedalic’s staff are interns. Most of them work for free in order to add something to their portfolio. Take a look at Daedalic’s recruiting page right now:

http://www.daedalic.de/de/Jobs/

Internships only. No real jobs.

So Fichtelmann should just stop gloating.

 

[DeepOcean]

Hate to burst your bubble, but it’s more than just a rumor that as much as 80% of Daedalic’s staff are interns. Most of them work for free in order to add something to their portfolio. Take a look at Daedalic’s recruiting page right now:

http://www.daedalic.de/de/Jobs/

Internships only. No real jobs.

So Fichtelmann should just stop gloating.

Now this guy is the real deal, his investigative skills are truly something to envy. I didn't know that programming and art experience on Germany grow on trees to the point of interns being able to substitute real programmers and artists.

"Most of them work for free in order to add something to their portfolio." This part is funny, you can see that he thinks that a portfolio is like a sticker album and the guy that never did a decent sized project is somehow a ace at programming that is just misunderstood and exploited.

 

[uaciaut]

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna’s Breakout, Harvey’s New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav’s Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we’d do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it’s alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

If armchair designers talk bad about Broken Age, they are wrong cause they never made a game before. If the fucking founder of Daedalic points out how bad Broken Age is, he is now a slave driver. Also, note that they are speaking out of their asses. The guy that starts all this rumor does it based on the fact that Daedalic's JOBS page was only hiring interims:

Hate to burst your bubble, but it’s more than just a rumor that as much as 80% of Daedalic’s staff are interns. Most of them work for free in order to add something to their portfolio. Take a look at Daedalic’s recruiting page right now:

http://www.daedalic.de/de/Jobs/

Internships only. No real jobs.

So Fichtelmann should just stop gloating.

Talked to a friend who works in IT in Germany, apparently Daedalic had a presentation there recently.
Anyway he said it's very unlikely for Daedalic to run on 80% interns, in most big cities IT engineers are really sought after, maybe 80% of art/sound design being interns at some point would be plausible since people in those depts actually do need quite a bit on their resume, which makes sense.
Also Daedalic was not looking for interns when they made a presentation at where he's working.

 

[J_C]

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna’s Breakout, Harvey’s New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav’s Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we’d do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it’s alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

Let's just think of this a minute. So on average their games cost 270.000 euros? And the Daedalic games look pretty good, they have quite a lot of content, and they are in development for around 1-1,5 years. No way in hell you can pay acceptable salaries to a dozen people (I assume this is their team size) if they have a family to run. Either they use interns for a lot of things, who work for free, or really these devs live on bread and water, and slaving away for minimal wage (if I look the german salaries). I'm not an expert, but if we do basic math: 270K, for 12 people for 18 months of development: 1250 euros/month/person (and this is even lower if the tax comes off). In Germany? People earn more in hungary FFS! Sorry, not buying this.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna’s Breakout, Harvey’s New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav’s Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we’d do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it’s alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

Let's just think of this a minute. So on average their games cost 270.000 euros? And the Daedalic games look pretty good, they have quite a lot of content, and they are in development for around 1-1,5 years. No way in hell you can pay acceptable salaries to a dozen people (I assume this is their team size) if they have a family to run. Either they use interns for a lot of things, who work for free, or really these devs live on bread and water, and slaving away for minimal wage (if I look the german salaries).

Or they don't live in California or anyplace else in :kwanzania:

 

[J_C]

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

I unfortunately have to admit that the combined budget of Edna’s Breakout, Harvey’s New Eyes, 1.5 Knights, Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, A New Beginning, The Whispered World, Satinav’s Chains, Memoria, 1954: Alcatraz and The Night of the Rabbit was less than 3M Euro. These are 11 adventure games with a mean length of usually 10 hours. None of these titles is just average! I have no idea what we’d do with 3M. A Heavy Rain, maybe. Should I be depressed? I just think it’s alarming that TS wanted to have 0.3M $ and now 3M are not enough. By the way, Deponia 1-3 is more than 40 HOURS long (!) and competes internationally, everywhere.

Let's just think of this a minute. So on average their games cost 270.000 euros? And the Daedalic games look pretty good, they have quite a lot of content, and they are in development for around 1-1,5 years. No way in hell you can pay acceptable salaries to a dozen people (I assume this is their team size) if they have a family to run. Either they use interns for a lot of things, who work for free, or really these devs live on bread and water, and slaving away for minimal wage (if I look the german salaries).

Or they don't live in California or anyplace else in :kwanzania:

I told the same things earlier, and I was told that Germany is not that much cheaper then the US.

 

[Bubbles]

You can't really average the budget for such a wide range of games. The Breakout was a Java game with art based on 640x480 doodles, minimal animation, and most of the characters voiced by Daedalic programmers. If they'd spent 270k on that they'd be financially incompetent too.

All their post-Java games also share the same engine, which supposedly allows you to create games "without any programming knowledge whatsoever". This costs them a flat €1000 per game for a full commercial license.

edit: Hey, custom title :D

 

[J_C]

You can't really average the budget for such a wide range of games. The Breakout was a Java game with art based on 640x480 doodles, minimal animation, and most of the characters voiced by Daedalic programmers. If they'd spent 270k on that they'd be financially incompetent too.

All their post-Java games also share the same engine, which supposedly allows you to create games "without any programming knowledge whatsoever". This costs them a flat €1000 per game for a full commercial license.

edit: Hey, custom title :D

Yes I know my math was not accurate, I was just trying to make a very rough estimate. Still, if you have a small team of 10 or so people working for more then a year, you have to pay their monthly salary. And it would be very thin if you only pay them 1200 per month.

All their post-Java games also share the same engine, which supposedly allows you to create games "without any programming knowledge whatsoever". This costs them a flat €1000 per game for a full commercial license.

I'm not buying this. You have to make the art, even if you have the engine. You have to do the voiceover (even if it is inhouse), script the puzzles, maybe make some basic marketing.

 

[Aeschylus]

It is a little mysterious how Daedalic can make games for so little, aside from their early cheap-o crappy ones. For the record, I don't actually believe their games are all made by interns, but even in the early 90s budgets for 2d adventure games were getting up towards $1m. There's probably a certain element of experience and efficiency involved, but they have to be cutting a lot of corners somewhere.

 

[Infinitron]

Is it possible that that quote was incorrectly translated from German?

 

[Bubbles]

Is it possible that that quote was incorrectly translated from German?

It wasn't. Original quote is in this thread, but it says the same as the English quote.

It is a little mysterious how Daedalic can make games for so little, aside from their early cheap-o crappy ones. For the record, I don't actually believe their games are all made by interns, but even in the early 90s budgets for 2d adventure games were getting up towards $1m. There's probably a certain element of experience and efficiency involved, but they have to be cutting a lot of corners somewhere.

Is Stasis expected to get $900k+ from external sources? Their Kickstarter budget is only a third of the average Daedalic game. They're using the same engine, incidentally.

 

[buzz]

Actually Daedalic doesn't do their sound/music/voice-acting in house, if the credits on mobygames are to be believed. The cost of living in Hamburg is half of the one in San Francisco according to this website.
Maybe it's the small stuff, like Daedalic using a normal coffee machine while Double Fine is ordering from Starbucks .

Here's a better measuring stick: According to Tim on Twitter, his previous adventure games had the following budget:
100k for Monkey Island
600k for Day of the Tentacle
1.5 million for Full Throtle
3 million for Grim Fandango
Let's assume he didn't adjust those budget estimates for inflation. With some internet calculator I got this:
$180k MI
$970k DotT
$2,3 mil FT
4,3 mil GF
LucasArts was still in San Francisco. Take also into consideration that technology was much more out-to-date than it is now and probably much more expensive than what we have nowadays, as well as the developing techniques. Admiteddly, MI, Dott and FT were done on the Scumm engine by people that had quite some experience with it already. But Grim Fandango had a brand new engine, with 3d models and everything.


Tim tweeted those estimates during the kickstarter campaign, so I assume this was his way of saying "with the amount of money we have right now, we should be able to do a game like this one I did before". Does any of you feel like Broken Age has the same quality those titles did?

 

[Infinitron]

Is it possible that that quote was incorrectly translated from German?

It wasn't. Original quote is in this thread, but it says the same as the English quote.

Well, assuming the guy didn't misspeak or exaggerate, the most straightforward explanation here is that Daedalic's employees are expert multitaskers. They work on a ton of games at once, such that any given developer works on multiple games at the same time on one salary.

So yeah, if they made all or many of those games that he listed in the same time that it took DoubleFine to make Broken Age, and with a similar number of developers, then maybe that makes sense.

 

[Bubbles]

There's certainly a high amount of unpaid internships as well, though I doubt it's anywhere near 60%. A quick google search shows a bunch of aspiring artists happy to have gotten a chance to show off their work in Deponia and Memoria. And scripting in Visionaire really does look easy as hell, so I guess they could have pushed that off on interns too.

None of this is unusual in Germany, mind you. Especially not in an industry that a lot of people really, really want to get into.

 

[Aeschylus]

Is Stasis expected to get $900k+ from external sources? Their Kickstarter budget is only a third of the average Daedalic game. They're using the same engine, incidentally.

And has been in development for years and years now in someone's spare time, and only has a couple people working on it. Apples to oranges. Daedalic pumps out games pretty quickly, and does it professionally.

 

[J_C]

There's certainly a high amount of unpaid internships as well, though I doubt it's anywhere near 60%. A quick google search shows a bunch of aspiring artists happy to have gotten a chance to show off their work in Deponia and Memoria. And scripting in Visionaire really does look easy as hell, so I guess they could have pushed that off on interns too.

None of this is unusual in Germany, mind you. Especially not in an industry that a lot of people really, really want to get into.

Sure, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is unfair from the company leader to laugh at DF, and say how little their own games cost, when half of their staff are interns, while obviousy it is not the case in DF's case.

 

[Bubbles]

Eh, I don't really want to fund a San Francisco lifestyle for some low level animator when I can get the same thing from a bright eyed intern for the price of a warm handshake. DF could easily have outsourced to Germany.

 

[felipepepe]

If that % ever had any truth behind it, it probably came from games like The Breakout; the game was almost made by a single guy, other people mostly appearing on Additional Art , Additional Animation, Additional Story Design... the fact that they are "Additional" probably means they did little or did just low-level stuff, meaning those might be the interns. If that's the case, that game does have 80% interns, and I see no problem in that.

Sure, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is unfair from the company leader to laugh at DF, and say how little their own games cost, when half of their staff are interns, while obviousy it is not the case in DF's case.

He's not laughing at their face, he's simply butthurt at how much money was wasted to make fucking 4 hours of a casual game, while he could have done 11 fucking games with that, almost all of them better than Broken Age. A sentiment that I share.

And one thing is a company wasting their own money with inflated budgets... the other is that company wasting the money it got form fans to make a game.

 

[Bubbles]

This video also mentions that Daedalic's animations are done in Photoshop and with "about" 12 frames per second, which apparently saves on expenses and animator training as well.

Also, a single artist did "almost all" of the backgrounds for Deponia 1-3. The lead designer scribbled every background himself first in pretty nice detail (Edna 1 style), then the lead artist did the backgrounds off the sketches. Very interesting stuff, actually.

 

[suejak]

I dunno, this forum has a confusing political orientation. I'm not sure if it's apathy or support for anything that will produce a Good Game, but it's weird. I remember people were okay with a taxpayer-funded German TBRPG before that got cancelled, and I find the use of (full-time, 3-6 month) interns to be a far nastier sin. Government enterprise or capitalist meathouse, hey, as long as it's not mainstream shit, right?

You will get lots and lots and lots of positive-sounding ex-Daedalic interns on the internet because those people want real jobs and a positive work history. It's an obvious outcome. The real question is whether it's ok to let all those people work for you for free, full time for 3 to 6 months. What are the social ramifications of that? It's a political question.

The fact is that Daedalic always seems to have 3-6 month full time internship openings on its site, and it has a reputation in Germany for using lots of interns. This is a studio that reports 120 employees with low project budgets, and cranks out game after barely-profitable game in recent years. You can say hyperefficiency and good management if that's what you really think -- they're certainly more efficient than the bohemian Double Fine -- but it seems like the sort of cost-cutting capitalist game factory that, while not bad, is not obviously the ideal either.

Double Fine has high costs in part because it tries to balance employee lifestyle with business. Daedalic has low costs because it clearly cuts corners to maximize profit. They're just different philosophies. Anyway, Double Fine sucks LOL.

 

[Bubbles]

Just to nitpick, but Daedalic's 120 employees don't all work at the studio. They're also a well sized publisher (their own games, Torchlight 2, Dragon Commander, Original Sin, Frogwares's Sherlock Holmes, a bunch of Telltale games), so a fair chunk of those 120 people is working on stuff far removed from game design.

And unpaid internships suck, but they're normal in Germany. Might as well shame Bioware for not offering full dental.

 

[Wizfall]

Political orientation aside, if you estimate 50% of the work is done by intern, Daedalic without interns should still be able to at least produce 5 games with 3 millions.

 

[buzz]

Yeah, it's not like anyone asked Double Fine to make 8 games with the money they received (even though they should've since they got 8 times the initial budget). The comparison with Daedalic is important to put things into perspective: A german company (full of interns or not) made several better-looking and better-playing games with the money DF used to make a half of one mediocre title.

 

[J_C]

Yeah, it's not like anyone asked Double Fine to make 8 games with the money they received (even though they should've since they got 8 times the initial budget). The comparison with Daedalic is important to put things into perspective: A german company (full of interns or not) made several better-looking and better-playing games with the money DF used to make a half of one mediocre title.

I don't argue that on a gameplay level Daedalic's games are much more adventure gamey, than Broken Age. As for better looking? Meh, to each their own? Daedalic's games have standard cartoon fare graphics, with little to no animation, and the animation they have are not too detailed. Broken Age has a unique artstyle and good animation (you might not like the artstyle, but it is different enough from the rest of the games). Sure, those animations and the new art cost them a lot, I don't argue that. They should have cut on that. On the other hand, unique visuals are DF's thing, they do this in every one of their games.

 

[jfrisby]

Since when do the management practices or business models of a company determine their legitimacy, or the perception of their games? What about those assholes that spend years making their games for free? Are they somehow sullying Double Fine's reputation, or cheating somehow?

I think the Daedalic games do look considerably cheaper than Broken Age, but you are giving your money to people making $120k+ and living entirely in fantasy land when you fund DF. They even spend it all, and are broke all the time.

Also, the entire intro sequence to the boys world in BA, as well as other big sequences that made it into the game, were sketched/designed by their German intern Marius.