It's not really a new trend at all, Kickstarter has been around for some time now and funded many many projects. So did similar Crowdfunding sites. Many Indie Game Developers have tried crowd-funding already and often failed. However, what Tim Schafer did there is extremely revolutionary in so many ways:

1. They raised a staggering amount of money there, which doesn't happen every day.

2. They managed to do it for a video game, which generally have a much harder time on these kind of sites compared to film projects and "conventional" artists (this is also why you haven't heard of crowd-funded games before this)

3. Not only did they do it for a video game, but for an Adventure no less. The oh-so-dead Adventure which we all knew wasn't really dead, but now others can see it too.

Bottom line:
As a Adventure Gamer this is great news to me. I grew up with Monkey Island and Lucas Arts Games in general, and I'm really happy to see them return to a conventional adventure. Actually that's saying it too polite, my reaction to the news was more like "O #$%^ YEA!" but you get it

It's also great to see how much energy really is left in the genre and the fans around it.

As a Indie Developer however I'm not sure yet what I should think about it all. We will just have to see how it will turn out. There is some definite curiosity by some industry people now to try it out themselves (like these guys), but of course that doesn't mean they will actually do it. If they'd do, it could be really bad on Indies trying to fund Games because they have to convince potential funders even harder than now to compete with the promises of the "big-shots" by showing more already-produced game (possibly with a bunch of accolades they already received, too).

But it also could go the other way entirely and bring a ton of new more open-minded potential funders to the table than there were before, resulting in something of a golden age for crowd-funded video games for big and small developers alike.

Who knows? Only time will tell for sure

This is sort of way over my head, folks, but what I think it means is say, if I like a new game that's being made, I'm going to have to keep shelling out money over time for that game (and pay thru the nose), but what if I don't want to get involved in this sort of thing? Will I miss out on being able to buy the game after its released?

cruise,

The game should be released to be sold to the public when done.

I believe in the case of double fine it's as much as a marketing coup than a reason to self finance a game, the cost of the game dev is not 400K but 300K, 100K are planned to be spent on making movies about the game creation, meaning Tim Schafer making jokes on the camera. Everyone tend to forget about it, which is a clear sign, that players are interested in the game and not in Tim Schafer himself, what everyone would probably expect is that he drop his idea of movies and invest the money into the game.

Using Kickstarter, double fine created people endorsement BEFORE the game is even started, it will guarantee a great expectation and reputation to something which is not created yet. That is purely marketing, in form of great promesses.

Usually publishers do that, making press release with a trailer or some screenshots and saying their game is going to be next cutting edge blablabla, and that everyone already love it. Double fine does the same but proves it with the pre-earn money, token of players trust.

it's really good news for adventure genre, and that players share the dreams of some great devs.

it's also the ultimate proof that publishers lost their position of game producers, and they are replaced, with enthusiast, by players. As a developer I can only applause with both hands to this demonstration and to the perspective it opens.

Now, that said, there is great chance that players will have the same flaws than publishers, tending to trust mostly people with a track record, the bigger it will be, the blinder they will be, and the more deaf they will be to dev really in the need of creating a first project.

Hi thehood --

It's great to see you stopping by and giving us a sense of how the creators of adventure games are viewing this new development.