Double Fine's Kickstarter triumph Broken Age delayed due to spiralling development costs

In a way, Double Fine kick-started the whole Kickstarter revolution. Well, Double Fine and that Pebble watch thingy.

Using the leverage of a big name - in this case Tim Schafer - and the promise of a return to classic adventuring values, Double Fine managed to smash its Kickstarter target of $400,000 and rake in more than $3 million.

Right now, Double Fine's campaign is the seventh most successful Kickstarter campaign in the history of the crowdfunding site.

Since attracting all those lovely donations back in spring 2012, Schafer's Double Fine studio has renamed its Kickstarter-backed project Broken Age and revealed that it would feature the intertwined stories of two children in parallel worlds.

Fast-forward to July 2013, and, well, Double Fine has run out of money.

In an update sent to Broken Age backers yesterday, Schafer explained that, essentially, he'd designed a game that was too big.

Double Fine crunched some numbers and came to the conclusion that the first half of the game would be ready in a year's time at the current rate of development. The full thing? 2015.

That's obviously a long way off, and development costs money, so Schafer has concocted a scheme.

The first half of Broken Age will be trimmed down a little and released on PC via Steam's Early Access service in January 2014.

Early Access is a distribution platform on which devs can sell pre-release content. Double Fine can then release an unfinished project and use the cash from selling that first part to fund the rest.

Almost inevitably, there's no mention of the mobile versions of Broken Age in this latest Kickstarter dev update. If you recall, iOS and Android editions of Broken Age were promised after Double Fine raised so much money from its Kickstarter campaign.

At this point, everything feels a bit, well, uncertain. If $3 million wasn't enough to make the game, imagine what would have happened if Double Fine had only raised its $400,000 target?

And while Double Fine was presumably struggling to deal with the size of the Broken Age undertaking, it crowdfunded another game via Kickstarter (entitled Massive Chalice), bagging more than $1 million in the process.

The Kickstarter revolution began on a wave of optimism. Here were game developers taking the power back from publishers. The question no one seemed to ask, though, was where that power was going to end up.