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Double Fine has just regained its independence as a studio after seven years at Microsoft, who founder Tim Schafer initially didn't want as a dad anyway. But things seemed OK until new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma stepped in for Phil Spencer.
"No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me," Schafer tells Bloomberg in a new report. "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." It's a good dog – Double Fine made the fantastic Psychonauts 2 and always commits to weird experiments like pottery brawler Kiln.
The developer's allegiance to the strange is what made Schafer suspicious of Microsoft in the first place, when it offered to buy the entire studio in 2019. He remembers thinking, "I don't want to get bought by you," since, "You guys love shutting down studios." But former Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was a real fan, and current Xbox CCO Matt Booty assured Schafer that Double Fine would get to feel self-sufficient – and it did, until Xbox's huge leadership overhaul this year.
"It's not all at once out of the blue," Schafer says, seemingly nodding to the realization that Sharma might have planned to include Double Fine in Xbox's mass layoffs. "It's like – oh, that person didn't reply to my joke text. That's kind of how you find out these things. So I knew before I knew."
Double Fine officially regained its independence on July 6 along with three other studios, including South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games. Schafer was convinced the studio would be dead at Microsoft "unless we had a breakout, Minecraft hit that year," but now he doesn't have to worry about such things; Double Fine just announced its new game Thank You Bus Driver on September 4. You play as a bus driver who wants passengers to say thank you.
"After all these years," says Schafer, "how little I understand about the business just shows how hard it is to know."
He continues, "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."
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After escaping Xbox, Double Fine lays off 23 people as Tim Schafer says "only the survival of our studio would ever make us consider such a painful action."
Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.
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