Too many brokens in this article, help
Broken Age was one of the early successes of Kickstarter, managing to raise $3.3 million of a $400,000 goal. It took a while between the two parts of the game, but eventually Double Fine made good on their promise and Broken Age was released in full a few months ago.
But despite the first part being released to the public in January 2014, it’s only eighteen months later the project’s finally “just about” broken even.
According to the final episode of Double Fine’s documentary chronicling the development of Broken Age, the studio put in roughly twice as much money as the Kickstarter managed to raise. Had the funds of the game come totally from Kickstarter, “breaking even” would have just meant releasing the game according to Tim Schafer (quote courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz):
My expectation with Broken Age in the end was just to break even… 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.
The cynical part of me is thinking this sounds pretty typical for Double Fine, who do unfortunately have a reputation for going over-budget with their projects, Broken Age included. However, it is also really nice to know that after so long the developers are finally getting something out of Broken Age.
Broken Age to break even for Double Fine [GamesIndustry.biz]
