No surprises here. Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 project, running on Fig, is already close to locking down its massive $3.3m funding goal, having secured $2.1 in a mere handful of days. I guess that’s what happens when a cult classic from a beloved developer goes off-radar for a decade, only to return in grand fashion, on stage at Sony’s yearly PlayStation Experience keynote.
Psychonauts 2 will undoubtedly be Fig’s first major breakthrough success. The crowdfunding platform, which allows both investors and backers to support potential projects, gives slightly more expensive and demanding projects a better chance of securing their funding. In the case of Psychonauts 2, it certainly helps to have a legend like Tim Schafer leading the project alongside his proven team at Double Fine.
Indeed, Gamespot reports that 40% of the current funds come from investors, with the remaining 60% coming from backers. Moreover, Double Fine are putting a lot of money into the game themselves, as well as a currently unidentified partner. In any case, the project is estimated to require a lot of money, which is no surprise, really, when you consider the ambitious reality of rendering trippy psychoscapes on modern systems.
Psychonauts 2 is going to be a thing. There’s no denying that. The question is, how long will the game be in development for? Has preliminary work already started? I expect we’ll see the original come to PS4 as a newly-branded PS2 classic any day now.
Want to learn more about Tim Schafer’s ideas for Psychonauts 2? Fancy helping the project meet its goal? Head over to Fig now, and jump in while you have the chance.
40% are investors! Wow there’s a lot of people who are going to lose their shirts, hopefully they don’t lose their wardrobes too 😛
No, 40% of the current funds come from investors. Only, that’s not true, it’s more than 50%. I don’t know where Gamespot takes their numbers from, but it’s fairly easy to verify: You just have to add up the pledges from regular backers (those listed on the site) and detract it from the overall sum listed at the top of the page. You can do the same thing with the actual number of backers. Last I looked (yesterday), 915 investors put in roughly 1,147,000 dollars (about 54% of the total).
Sure, some regular backer might pledge 5,000 dollars but only choose the USD 100 reward tier, thus skewing this calculation. However, from the previous two campaigns, the numbers were always off less than 1,000 dollars (20 in the case of AitD), so this method should be sufficiently precise.
But I agree. Many eager investors will be unpleasantly surprised to learn how the actual games market works when(ever) “Psychonauts 2” comes out…