Double Fine Productions’ boss Tim Schafer recently explained how the studio avoided closure following significant layoffs at Xbox, stating, “no one puts Double Fine out of business except for me.”
In an interview with Bloomberg, Schafer described his efforts to secure Double Fine’s intellectual property and funding, enabling the studio to regain its independence.
“You’re like, ‘Wait a second, we’re not going out like this’,” he said. “Some people said: ‘I’m checking out, this is one too many battles for me.’ But for the rest of us, it’s like a creative awakening.”
Microsoft acquired Double Fine in 2019, with then-Xbox head Phil Spencer confident the studio’s games would succeed on Game Pass. After Spencer retired in February, Schafer noticed Asha Sharma had a different vision, especially since Keeper and Kiln underperformed financially.
“We had a mutually beneficial mission, which is just to put great games on Game Pass, and then their mission changed. I can’t imagine any amount of profitability – unless we had a breakout, Minecraft hit that year – would’ve saved us.”
He added: “No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me. Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot it. But I’m not going to shoot it because it’s going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog.”
Since regaining independence, Double Fine has cut 23 positions, bringing the team to just under 70. “We expanded under Microsoft, but have returned to our previous, sustainable size as an independent studio.”
Double Fine is presenting new game concepts to investors, which Schafer described as a “really interesting process [after] coming out again after seven years.”
“The whole landscape has changed so much […] After all these years, how little I understand about the business just shows how hard it is to know. That’s why I’m focused on keeping my team alive. That’s why we do these creative things all the time. If we stopped doing these wacky creative things, we’d eventually be like, ‘Who cares?’ These games aren’t lucrative enough to make up for how hard they are. They have to also be really fun and rewarding to make.”
Regarding their approach to pitching games as an independent studio, Schafer stated they have “never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money.”
“I think people would say, ‘Oh, Keeper looks like this art house thing that no one expects to be a hit.’ But to me it’s the kind of game that someone who doesn’t play games would love. I really think there’s a mass market appeal to Keeper. If we could just get to those people, we could have them catch Lighthouse Fever.”
Double Fine recently announced its fifth Amnesia Fortnight event, where small teams develop game prototypes. The event features a Kickstarter campaign and an accompanying documentary produced by 2 Player Productions.
“We’ve been through a lot this year,” said Schafer. “A lot of it is very soul-sucking stuff. Inner conflict, threats of extermination, long negotiations, strenuous hard tradeoffs with lawyers. Tons of demoralising stuff.”
“This is the good fight. Can we think of a great idea for a game that we can actually do for the right budget, that can get to this publisher who’s interested in these types of games? This kind of problem-solving is soul-enriching. Using creativity to solve problems is what gets us up in the morning. So it is hard, and it is scary and it is stressful, but it’s at least putting some fire back into the bellies of the team and me.”