Broken Age breaks in half for faster public release

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer updated Broken Age crowd-funding participants with the news that the adventure game will be split in two during development and the first half will be released faster than projected on Steam Early Access. Double Fine will continue working on the game after the Early Access release until the game is complete. Schafer estimated that the game’s full release would’ve been pushed back to 2015 without this new strategy.

We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development. The second part of the game would come in a free update a few months down the road, closer to April-May.

So, everybody gets to play the game sooner, and we don’t have to cut the game down drastically. Backers still get the whole game this way – nobody has to pay again for the second half.

Schafer attributed the ballooning schedule for the game to the crowd-funding success which resulted in the project raising over $3 million dollars when only $400k had been requested. Schafer also noted that backers will still have exclusive beta access before the Steam Early Access release.