Not to defend them or anything but you cannot really compare an Indy dev working with a very small team to a professional development studio with developers/artist/etc.. you actually have to pay every month. (And if they use well known actors as voice actor they can easily destroy most of their budget before actually typing a single line of code)

3 millions looks like a huge sum but it's actually a small budget, a better comparison would be with Deadelic but as far as I know we don't know the budget of their games.

This stuff is all over the internet. Are you really that naive? Or do you just enjoy being a cantakerous prick?
That's what pushes this over the edge from just incredibly bad planning to bordering on one huge con job.

They already can't fund the one game they were given a massive amount of money to make so, wait......let's ask for more but not tell anyone we're already running out of money. Slimy to the max, IMO, and really too bad as I always liked Double Fine games.

What is the first kickstarter project you backed up if I dare ask ???

Yep, and another reason why I never pre-order games either.

This kind of garbage happens all the time, with pre-orders for games being put up 9 MONTHS or more before the game releases, only for people who pre-ordered it to find out later it's months behind budget or, when it is released, it's a piece of crap.

When I see a developer putting up a pre-order for a game half a year or longer before a game is due to release, I immediately know they're likely having financial problems and attempting to fund completion of the game. And no, I would never pre-order, no matter how much I wanted to play the game.

When will gamers learn? It's like so many of them get their rocks off on wasting their hard-earned money.
Sorry - I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember the name it's been that long since I backed it :)

The Banner Saga - it was supposed to be released in September, 2013 and then November, 2013. Still waiting )

There is a multi-player bashfest thing they spent boatloads of time creating, but that I have no interest in playing, but still no sign of the single-player game most of the backers funded. They're now saying late 2013, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm fine with it. It was the first huge Kickstarter, and they didn't expect that much success. They went from a small adventure game to much bigger.

I'm sure they will deliver, and I have absolutely no problem with Early Access.

It's hard to be the first, and that will teach them (and other folks) a lot. It's good it's DF, someone else could say "sorry, moneys over".

They might be veteran game developers, but I doubt that they had that much experience handling budgets by themselves. After all, if you go from someone that used to rely on publishers to fund the game for a lot of time to someone that has to rely on his own, well, you just don't have the experience.

I really don't care about the delay as long as the game will be awesome. Psychonauts was also delayed a lot, but it turned out great and I am hoping this will be as well.

I wonder why :p. Well, I hope they deliver a great product.

Eventually I'll judge them based on how well their games turn out to be (particularly Massive Chalice since that's the one I'm interested in :) )

I am a backer of this project and I also felt taken aback when I read it. Basically the designer of the project (Tim?) acted extremely unprofessional and risked the success of the whole project. What a shame. Obviously they have zero managerial skills.

Anyway, they won't get more money from me. Their task was to deliver a polished, nice little game in time, just the right thing for their budget, but they failed and now we may have a big, unfinished monster by somewhere in the future. I value this far less.

A good lesson how you can fuck up and why developers on their own aren't much better off than with publishers. And a good lesson that KS isn't that far away from a pre-order than thought. Because it's not the backers who make the wrong decision, it's always somewhere on the other side and it does not matter so much if they call themselves publisher or developer.
Failing is part of the economy. Everybody fails sometimes. But I hope that KS gets a more realistic treatment in the future. For small projects it's ideal. For larger projects backers should demand much more professionalism and securities. Or maybe just more insight or maybe that the design is already finished and the costs are clear. I will continue invest in small projects (<200k $) but I will hesitate in taking part in anything bigger.

It was pitched as a $300,000 small little Wadjet Eye style game. If their company bulk prevented them from actually doing that, maybe they shouldn't have said they could?

You're rarely disingenuous, though almost always cranky, so pardon me while I get some negative rep.

They've not been shy pointing out that scope creep is the biggest part of this failure. Have you ever done project management with a changing scope? There's a reason people who can modify project features or size and stay within budget and time deadlines get paid well. It's not trivial. There's no reason to believe that their corporate bulk, as you say it, would have prevented them from making a $300k game. There's rather a lot of evidence that their enlarged corporate bulk is preventing them from making a multimillion dollar game. Stay focused. There's plenty to talk about without getting your foundation wrong.

Reading the update after waking up was a bummer. I invested my money with low expectations in the first place, so it's not really shocking. I have eyes, so I can see differences at Wasteland 2 and Broken Age productions and how it reflects the management's effectiveness.

On the other hand, I have saved a lot of money by buying games with Steam DRM for handful of bucks and a small part of it invested in Kickstarter projects. It won't be a real loss if DF fails to deliver. I have appreciated them being upfront about financial difficulties but keeping this update from backers til their other project is funded is, well, not a welcomed practice. I'll wait and see.

And OP, despite the information being common knowledge now, I don't like backers-only leaks, the full copy-paste update in this case, so here goes your -1.

All i can say is ouch.

With the recent Legends of Dawn cock up (backers getting the game after steam users get to buy it and then finding more bugs than a bug farm) it makes me want to rethink giving money to backing projects. Hopefully these are blips in the kickstarter games but still.

I think the biggest problem is that Double Fine are too big, look at any of their videos and you'll see heaps of people, and I think there's even more employees we haven't seen. At a time when the economy is so tight (especially in game development) and most companies are purposely keeping their number of pay-roll employees low, Double Fine seem to me to basically be a huge indie welfare racket, bloated and paying too high wages to employees.

Hell the first thing DF should have done after the Kickstarter is force all employees to take a huge pay-cut under a contract guarantee that if Broken Age is produced quickly and is a good game, they will get a bonus from first sales to make up for pay cuts. Not to mention they should be downsizing their office and getting as many non-core team members to work from home to keep costs down.

Schafer probably doesn't have the guts (or the brains) to fire anyone though.

What they really should of done, is bite the bullet and downsize the entire studio to a core team of 20~ people, with 3.2+ million that would give them at least 18 months dev time, enough to make an adventure game.