Double Fine Wasn’t Being “Greedy” With Second Kickstarter

Massive Chalice lead Brad Muir says that big name Kickstarter campaigns help smaller projects find funding.

In 2012, Tim Schafer’s studio Double Fine arguably kicked off a boom of studios and developers turning to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter to raise money for their projects. Double Fine’s campaign would go onto to raise more then three million dollars, money that has since been put toward the development of the still in-progress title Broken Age. The arguable poster child for gaming fundraisers, Double Fine recently launched a second campaign, this time to raise money for a turn-based strategy title called Massive Chalice.

It was a move that could arguably have irked some in the gaming community. Double Fine, in some ways, could have been seen as exploiting crowdfunding resources when it had yet to deliver the game promised in its previous campaign. Likely aware that such criticisms could arise, the studio addressed the issue directly on the Massive Chalice Kickstarter page. Now, with the Massive Chalice campaign a success, project lead Brad Muir has offered further insight into why the company opted to Kickstart a second project less than two years after its first. “We’re not greedy,” said Muir. “Double Fine’s a pretty large company at this point and we have multiple teams. We need to make sure they’re all working on funded projects and we were excited about the idea of doing more projects out in the open like Broken Age. It’s highly unlikely that we’d be able to be this public with our development process if we had signed the game with a traditional publisher.”

While some might try to make the argument that smaller, less visible projects could use the funding more, Muir would counter that the success of campaigns like Massive Chalice’s are beneficial to crowdfunding as a whole. “Kickstarter has been very public about the fact that bringing more people to the Kickstarter system through higher profile projects only helps out the lower profile projects,” said Muir. “We received some awesome emails during the Broken Age Kickstarter from indie game devs thanking us for having such a positive effect on their Kickstarters that were running at the same time.”