It’s been a long time since the whole wave of crowdfunding truly kicked off in style. We’ve all probably spent way too much on the likes of Kickstarter and Early access for content to arrive at end products which we’ve either then gone onto enjoy or cursed the day we ever heard of the damn things we spent money on in the first place. Indeed it was the subject of a couple of Gaming Car crash live stream videos at one point or another.

However, away from the lies, treachery and deceit of the world where we all normally have to live in whether we like it or not, there was something else which caught the magic eye and once again as you are probably shocked to know, it’s in the world of video games (something this blog is being devoted to more and more it appears) and not us just remarking on the fact that Disney is probably about to buy the world with the profits it makes from Star Wars.

You see, in this new search for money, news came in recently that Double Fine’s “Psychonauts 2?, a sequel which a lot of people including myself pined over for quite a while, seems have reached over $3 Million on the newly established crowd-funding platform called Fig, should have been one that’s most welcome.

The ones the Russians wouldn’t go into space with…..

However…..I will not be joining in on this occasion and instead of splashing the cash out as I have done previously, this is one to sit out and wait and see what happens. Why you ask? Well you would if you were there talking directly to me, but as this is just a bunch of words strung together to form sentences which may or may not make any sense, let’s just skip to the why anyway!

Now why would this be more risky than the usual gumpf of crowd funding where you’re not in any way guaranteed to get what you put money into in the first place? No matter what you do, there is always the risk the project collapses worse than Richard E Grant did in “Withnail and I” when confronted by a bloke in the pub.

You see, on this occasion, there are questions abound about how this project is getting funded and what potentially people and now, new to the action, actual investors will be getting for their money. A few individuals enterprising enough (or bored enough) on the internet to look into how the crowd funding operation for Fig and by extension, for this project. It appears that there is by default a huge amount of trust being placed onto people that they will actually get what they put money into, more than the usual kickstarter thing and that is down to the investment part of the Fig project. You basically put in a minimum of $500 + and provided the game sells a few million copies, you will get a bit more back than what you spent in the first place. Hmm, sounds like something where you end up like those chaps on the Money SuperMarket adverts? EPIC!

Good lord, Fig even provide a handy little calculator for this to show you where you break even and where you make money at various levels.

Where’s the money Lebowski? Bunny said you’re good for it…..

However…..the figures provided are based on the total sales that the first game, Psychonauts 1 (funnily enough) and well, the game wasn’t a massive success to begin with and it took a re-release and polish up on the Steam platform for it to get to this level of sales too, not to mention the fact this had been on sale over and over and over again to reach the number of copies purchased.

This is where the calculator lets you down as it surely it assumes an certain price level for the game to always sell at in order to get the money back that it states? More so over, Tim Schafer, head of Double Fine, is on the board of Fig itself, and therefore may have more than a casual interest in ensuring that this campaign was successful. More on the dubious nature of the Psychonauts 2 campaign came up on a Youtube video released by dangerous analysis and it does go into some boring details but suffice it to say, it doesn’t look too clever. You can view it below here;

Despite the paranoid tone of the video, it’s bloody hard to ignore the evidence presented. But what if you’re just like any other person wanting to chuck some money at something you’ve been waiting for ages and want to support it because it’s the fans getting what they want? Well that in itself is also debatable when it comes to Double Fine.

Now for the record, and to ensure everything is on the level in terms of bias here, I’ve invested in Double Fine’s kickstarter projects before, among a great many of them to be fair, and included some of the prototype bundles they created at one time or another. Hell for a couple of the games if you want long enough, you’ll see my name in the credits along with countless other people. Quite happy as it goes with that.

But to date, Double Fine have not been consistent enough in what they have delivered to risk further investment at this time. Their first kickstarter, A Double Fine Adventure, was a run away success on the platform as a lot of people wanted a return of old school adventure games. The original ask was about $400,000 and they got above $3 million. So in essence, it should have been a show in for delivery right?

Nope.

A tale of two halves….just a year apart due to lack of cash…

They basically p*ssed away the budget on making the game too big and it appears hiring lots of people from Hollywood for voice acting so then they split the game into two parts, released the first part under early access and used the money earned from that to actually finish the product a year later, called it Broken Age which did alright on review but wasn’t exactly classed as a masterful return for the genre.

And there’s that tiny little matter of the fact that not everything promised has actually been shipped yet….a long time after release which means those which spent more, are still left hanging wondering when what was promised, will be in their hands. The Collector’s Edition of the game in hard box springs to mind….

A subsequent project, Massive Chalice was also funded through kickstarter but asked for more money than the first time and got just over $1.2 million, a different story to the first time. This however was delivered without going back to people for more cash to finish and again, a similar story in terms of review, good but not the “oh my god orgasm” you would want from a game which had a hell of a lot in common with X-Com but less slimy aliens doing naughty in Moscow.

The bigger worry, is also the elephant in the room when it comes to Double Fine’s attempts at crowd funding; SpaceBase DF-9. Rather than sound like a rip off of Star Trek, this was a space simulator type thing where you built a new home and dealt with all sorts of silliness since society had buggered up. This was an Early access title which in essence was abandoned by Double Fine for various reasons much to the anger of people who bought the game expecting like every other project, this would be finished. Was this another case of bad money management ala Broken Age?

With a beard like that…I suspect lies!

The fact of the matter is, that they are also quite a big fish now with the various amounts of attention and to keep asking for a lot of money up front with no accountability, is starting to look mighty fishy, to the point where you really do want to sit this one out and actually wait for a change, rather than get on the hype train as we did right at the very beginning of all this kickstarting type thing.

They have also been releasing a number of Lucasarts games on modern platforms and by all accounts they did alright, so where has the money gone for those perhaps is a reasonable thing to ask? Granted it can be what’s making up the chunk in funding coming from Double FIne themselves, but we honestly don’t know. There are a lot of vague details here which pushes this too far into the too risky category for my taste.

So to sum up; Don’t back this campaign. For once, leave it be and see what the result is in 2018. There are plenty of finished products coming before then. Again any venture which is in early access or being kickstarted, runs the risk of never finishing. But this seems more riskier than most.

However, if you still wish to get in on the action yourself even after all that, you may do so still at https://www.fig.co/campaigns/psychonauts-2 where at the time of writing, it has about 8 days left for further funding to take place and you can see the pitch video there as well if you require convincing. But I honestly would wait on this one instead.