What would a realistic cost be for a game like the one they are proposing?
Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists, musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising, etc.
Well, they said it would be a small team of 6-7 people, and their aim is to finish for October. With that math, we're looking at those devs being paid around 70k a year, give or take. Which is probably about right.
I'm not sure how taxes affect the money raised from Kickstarter -- but I assume the plan from Double Fine was to get a bunch of the money from the internet, and then throw in a bit of their own.
As for creating an adventure game, it's not a very large technical challenge, for the most part. 7-8 quality devs for 8 months? I can believe they could bust out an adventure game, at a low fidelity art style.
The biggest costs to an adventure game would be asset creation. Drawing everything, or modelling everything. That's where the money will go primarily.
$300,000 is before they sell anything. If the game was even just moderately successful they'd probably make that much again in sales. So the $300k number may have been the number they figured they'd need to get far enough to convince someone to advance them the rest of the money against future sales.
Their $300,000 estimate doesn't seem very high. After taxes, that's probably enough for 2-4 full time dev-years (and they'll need programmers, artists, musicians, et al.). Not to mention infrastructure costs, lawyers, advertising, etc.