What a fiasco. An old man allowing himself to be carried away into hype and wishful thinking. I laugh in his face.

Particularly @ the bolded, I wish them the best, and after the last Duke Nukem flop, it will be awesome if Torment instead, after so many years, will leave us a legacy of not just one, but two great games. It will also be a great achievement for the fundraising model.

About Double Fine, even considering Schafer's record at bad project planning and management, I still can't believe they botched it after receiving funds so many times larger than their goal...

This is why you need publishers, the creatives need some people to push them in the right direction. Just look at Valve as well, they haven't released anything for ages, they just got lucky and their first few games sold well before they found the infinite well of money that is Steam

I guess it is my fault, I backed their Kickstarter assuming that I would get the game on a reasonable schedule and now they need to more funding. This is what happens if you buy an unspecified product that has no real description or timeframe....

Oh well, I won't be backing any more Kickstarters getting really excited about a game, then paying for it before they have even started development. Oh wait, Massive Chalice....

What the actual hell.

$3.3m vs. $400k they were asking for and it's both late and over budget?

I don't think we can even call it over budget. Since the "budget" should've been $400k.

That's either a really appalling attempt to pre-estimate cost/time or a really poor management of resources after pledges. Either way, fiasco sounds about the right word for this.

one problem is that they promise more and more stuff as more those developers get above their set goal.

i think those who back a game should also stop backing more and more when the goal is already reached. developers start to promise even more levels and stuff like that then but they are still the same amount of people working on the project. increasing the size of their project has to mean much more work.

more work means more costs and more needed time. if they ask for 500k but get 2m and promise 4x as much because of that, the project will be also much more expensive and will take much more time as long as they don't increase the number of people working on the project which would be an even bigger risk then...

most of the time they only get so much more money because they start to promise more and more when they reach their goal. not sure what they promised as extras for this game after they reached their first goal but if they wouldn't have done that, it would have been probably only 1m instead of 3.5m they got. and with that, the game would be probably smaller and easier to handle for them even with much less money.

it surely sounds cool when they reached their goal and say "woah thx guys, here is a new goal: 600k and a new level....woah thx, new goal: 900k and better graphics....1.5m for a whole new world..." and so on. but how that shall work with the same staff they had when they asked for 400k is something they should explain before people give them so much more.

they can promise a soundtrack from a real orchestra or something like that. this makes sense and wouldn't take more time for the people working on the game. but when i read that they promise a much bigger game i would like to know how they want to handle that.

i know, they are a pretty big team for a "small" developer but maybe they shouldn't have started a second project after they saw how this project got so much money. maybe they should have realized that they need the whole team for this game now. that would at least decrease the developing time. 

ok, those who work on one game are probably not perfect for the other game since that are pretty different games but still, starting a new kickstarter project so short after they got so much money for the other project without really knowing how to handle that is crazy.

Well, that's ridiculous. I can see there being delays to accommodate for the larger game, but to actually start running out of money when you got $2.9M more than you were asking for? There is no excuse.

1) Well, actually not necessarily, but if you give up an external publisher, you need a team manager very good also at practical skills about running the dev team as an independent business. Just look at Mojang, he did all the PC part almost alone, hiring others when his business grew beyond his ability of running it alone, and after he chose to have a third party publisher and also a third party dev to make and sell the XB360 version, this proves that the two models can even coexist in the same SW house.

2) And actually Valve proves that shifting to a publisher point of view a dev can damage its own creativity.

3) I'd choose instead the golden mean between blind faith and distrust. Don't forget that with blind faith you could not find your way home, but with distrust you'd stay at home alone!   

I just hope they make a good game.