After Microsoft has acquired Double Fine Productions, the San Francisco-based studio’s leader, Tim Schafer thinks that the team can now focus on games again, and even experiment under Microsoft.

„The great thing about the acquisition is it lets us refocus – it lets us focus at all – instead of making a game while worrying about all these other aspects. For me, I’m going to be focusing on Psychonauts 2, Lee Petty is going to be focusing on Rad, and then we can think about new games and being able to develop them and being in a place where we can pursue strange new ideas. I’m really just excited about pursuing ideas that feel experimental,” Schafer told Gamasutra.

„I think they’ve had a commitment to a new way of acquiring companies which is, kind of an unplugged studio approach, where they’re not merged into the larger corporate entity. They don’t just auto-hire—take a bunch of employees and make them Microsoft employees. They want us to retain our identity, our spirit, that’s what they want us to bring into the fold.

GamePass was a lot of it. Seeing something like GamePass and how it made sense to have a diversity of content. I could see why having a company like us and a company that makes games like Forza – very different games – all being on one subscription service like that makes it more valuable. I could see how they would want to bring us in and not change us,” Tim Schafer added.

Double Fine can finish Psychonauts 2 as a multiplatform game, so it could show up on the PlayStation 4 before the team goes towards the Xbox Project Scarlett and Windows 10. Thus, they are in the same shoes as inXile or Obsidian.

Source: WCCFTech