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Tim Schafer on Stacking, Costume Quest, Brütal Legend, and Iron Brigade, "We're Still Trying To Get The Rights"
Yesterday at Kill Screen's inaugural Two5Six conference in Brooklyn, New York, we had the chance to catch up with keynote speaker Tim Schafer, CEO of Double Fine. The legendary designer spoke to us about the role of reviewers in the Kickstarter landscape, the studio's past work with publishers, and a possible foray back into crowd funding.
We asked Schafer about the THQ auction and the acquisition of Costume Quest and Stacking by Nordic Games Publishing.
"We're still trying to get the rights to Costume Quest and Stacking," Schafer confirmed. "We can still make more of those games. We still have the IP, but we'd love to have all of the IP and distribution rights in house."
Schafer also revealed that two other Double Fine games will hopefully be coming home. "We're trying to get the Brütal Legend IP from EA, and we're interested in Iron Brigade coming back in [from Microsoft]."
We asked Schafer how he viewed the role of critics in relation to a Kickstarter project. "All the risk is up front," he said. "With Brütal Legend, the first review told us we weren't getting rich off this. We were biting our nails because we had a half million dollar Metacritic bonus riding on it. Reviews matter because we have four teams and we're thinking about another [Kickstarter] project. We're not sure if people would be receptive, but inXile changed our minds."
Brian Fargo and his studio, inXile, first successfully raised funds for Wasteland 2. They returned a year later and also succeeded in securing backing for a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, entitled Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Double Fine's Broken Age, funded via Kickstarter, is on track for release later this year. We've got an extensive preview available for you right now, though.
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