Broken Age

• Action
• Gameplay / mechanics

Broken Age, referred to in the preliminary reporting under the working title Double Fine Adventure, is a point- and -click adventure game by Tim Schafer and his company Double Fine Productions, which was funded through the internet platform Kickstarter via crowdfunding.

The first chapter, Act I, was published on 28 January 2014, the distribution platform Steam for Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux, as well as for Apple iOS and Google Android in English language edition, with English, French, Italian, Spanish and German subtitles. Kickstarter supporters were already on January 14, 2014 access to a pre-release version of the game and supporters who contributed $ 100 or more also received a DVD version.

Already at the beginning of the project it was due to the method of financing large media attention and sparked a crowdfunding boom in computer games from.

Crowdfunding

Since Tim Schafer could not find a publisher who would have been willing to provide the funding for a classic point-and -click adventure, he decided to financing for an adventure game with the working title Double Fine adventure via the internet platform kickstarter.com to try. From an amount of $ 15, he secured all supporters a DRM-free copy of the game as a kind of pre- planned to; for higher contributions, he offered additional extras or sending a limited collectibles. Just eight hours after starting the Kickstarter project reached by contributions from adventure fans and new prospects budgeted by Schafer for a successful financing U.S. $ 400,000; after one day there were over a million dollars.

The Kickstarter campaign ended with a total of 3.3 million U.S. dollars at 87 142 supporters. There were still about 110,000 U.S. dollars assistance outside the Kickstarter platform. The budget of the Double Fine Adventures thus corresponded to Schafer's previous project Grim Fandango. It was the largest to date on Kickstarter outstanding financing action. According to the platform operator, the project had an enormous impact on the financing of other game projects. So were previously in the two years since the foundation of the platform total 1,776,372 U.S. dollars for Games projects received. Six weeks after application of the Double Fine Adventures additional 2,890,704 U.S. dollars have been invested in other game projects. 61 692 of the Double Fine 's supporters, 71 % of the total supporters, had re-registered on the occasion of the project on Kickstarter.

According to the company, the former LucasArts translator Boris Schneider- Johne has a free translation into the German language offered.

Due to the financial success of the game wide media attention was given out after a few days also about video game magazines, as appeared in Germany about the Handelsblatt an article on the financing.

Aftermath

The success of the Kickstarter campaign prompted another known game developers and companies to try to finance their projects on the same route. Brian Fargo, founder and former president of Interplay Productions, which had developed very successful computer role-playing games in the 80s and 90s and dominated the game type crucial reached within 48 hours of the estimated minimum amount of U.S. $ 900,000 for a new edition of his post-apocalyptic role-playing game Wasteland. His project Wasteland 2 received by the end of March, U.S. $ 400,000 alone from those supporters who had registered for Double Fine new to kickstarter.com. Total came over three million U.S. dollars together. Jordan Weisman, a co-founder of FASA Corporation generated $ 1.8 million dollars for a new implementation of the Shadowrun game system as a computer game Shadowrun Returns. Al Lowe, a former developer at Sierra On-Line, famous for his Adventures of the Leisure Suit Larry series, wooed $ 500,000 support for another remake of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and promised if successful, in the future to create new adventures in this way. It finally came about 655,000 U.S. dollars together .. Jane Jensen, also a former Sierra On-Line Developer, known by the Adventures of the Gabriel Knight series, successfully campaigned with a concept called Community Supported Gaming for $ 300,000 for the finance their new adventure game development studios Pinkerton Road Studios.