Earlier this summer, Double Fine was at risk of being closed. Now he is independent again and moving forward with a $400,000 Kickstarter for his next game jam. If studio founder Tim Schafer is tired of fighting, he doesn’t show it. He talked about leaving Xbox and explained what’s in store for the Psychonauts 2 creator in a new interview with Bloomberg. “Some people said, ‘I’m leaving, this is too much of a battle for me.’ But for the rest of us, it’s like a creative awakening,” Schafer said. Double Fine, which released the critically acclaimed but poor-selling Keeper in 2025 and the less well-received ceramic party game Kiln earlier this year, didn’t escape the current Xbox reboot completely unscathed. He had to lay off 23 people, and Schafer says some of Microsoft’s initial funding won’t last long. But the studio is once again independent and capable of charting its own course. That brings with it an enormous amount of risk, but also a clarifying new level of creative urgency. “The games industry is full of terrible things and I can’t change most of them,” Schafer said. “It’s like I’m the captain of a little fishing boat. And it’s like worrying about whether the ocean is fair. I can’t do much about it. Just keep this little boat afloat, keep trying to see if it’s a reef or if it’s a bunch of fish. Is that money there?” He said that being part of Xbox worked for a while, but when new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma replaced Phil Spencer, it became clear that things were going to change. “We had a mutually beneficial mission, which was just to put great games on Game Pass, and then their mission changed,” Schafer said. “I can’t imagine that any amount of profitability (unless we had a breakthrough, Minecraft came that year) would have saved us.” While the writing may have been on the wall, Xbox’s decision to ditch Double Fine was abrupt. Bloomberg reports that as of early summer there was still no clarity on what Sharma was planning. Schafer found it difficult to get a direct response from anyone at Xbox, while some stopped responding to his messages altogether. Instead of being bitter, the veteran developer treated it as a time to recover. He’s currently at PAX West this weekend helping out at the Double Fine booth. “Nobody puts Double Fine out of business except me,” is one way Schafer explained it to Bloomberg. “Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot him. But I’m not going to shoot him because he’ll do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog.”
