Double Fine Becomes Independent Studio
Double Fine has fully transitioned into an independent studio after leaving Xbox earlier this year. The studio now has full publishing rights to the games it made under Microsoft and earns all the revenue when you buy them, CEO Tim Schafer confirmed on the Kinda Funny podcast.
“Everything we got back, the transfer of the IP came back to us, and we got the publishing rights back for all our games,” he said. Steam still lists the publisher as Xbox Game Studios for games like Psychonauts 2 and Keeper, but that’s because it “takes a while for all of that to process,” he said. “When people buy our games it helps support the studio.”
Later this month, the studio will start a Kickstarter campaign based around its annual Amnesia Fortnight game jam, which is the same game jam where some of its previous games, like Costume Quest and Stacking, were born. The entire thing will be filmed and turned into a documentary, and backers of the campaign will help choose which idea gets made into a small game.
Schafer said the Kickstarter campaign and the revenue from its games will help the studio “have as much runway as possible” as it works on pitching other projects to publishers.
Double Fine laid off 23 members of its staff last month to become “a size that we can sustain,” Schafer wrote in a statement at the time. The news came less than a month after Microsoft allowed it to go independent as it began a major restructuring at Xbox and laid off 3,200 people.
South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games, the other studio Microsoft cut loose, recently announced it too has full publishing rights to its games and that buying them will directly support the studio as it figures out what’s next.
In addition to promoting the Kickstarter, Schafer teased a major update with new maps and modes and a price drop coming next week to Kiln, the studio’s recently released pottery brawler multiplayer game. And I’ll add that if you’re not a PvPer, you should check out Double Fine’s adventure game starring a sentient lighthouse and a bird called Keeper. As I said in the Keeper review, it’s easily one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever played.
