It took Double Fine just two weeks to recover the complete $400,000 external investment in Spacebase DF-9.
A $400,000 development budget may not sound like much compared to the money spent on triple-A titles like Modern Warfare or BioShock, but it’s a lot of coin for an indie studio and a bit beyond the reach of the Indie Fund. So to support the development of Spacebase DF-9, the space station simulator announced by Double Fine in October, the Indie Fund teamed up with Humble Bundle, Hemisphere Games, make all, AppAbove Games, Adam Saltsman, The Behemoth, Morgan Webb and Rob Reid to cover the cost.
The good news for all involved is that it took just two weeks for the open alpha version of the game to earn back the entire $400,000 investment. 85 percent of the revenue came from Steam Early Access, according to an Indie Fund blog post, while the balance was earned through direct sales.
“This is an important milestone for us because the success of this experiment opens the door for us to support more projects of this magnitude in the future. To be clear, this won’t affect the number of smaller projects we fund. Our bottleneck has always been finding promising projects to invest in, not lack of funds,” the message states. “It also provides an encouraging data point about bringing together larger groups of people to support larger projects, and we are mulling over what this might mean for the future of Indie Fund.”
Founded by indie developers Jonathan Blow, Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, Aaron Isaksen, Kellee Santiago, Nathan Vella and Matthew Wegner, the Indie Fund is a simple, flexible source of investment for independent game developers. The fund has previously supported Q.U.B.E, Antichamber and Dear Esther.
Source: The Indie Fund
