Big things are on the horizon for Schafer and Double Fine. We had a chance to sit down with Schafer at PAX West to chat about all sorts of stuff — the future and the past, successes and regrets, big games and small games. And, of course, we get into the Microsoft acquisition and what that means for Double Fine.

[The following interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.]


Destructoid:How has work been since the Microsoft acquisition? I imagine things are less stressful on your end — not needing to constantly worry about the business and financial side of a lot of things now. That's the parent company's job.

Tim Schafer:Soon. The deal was agreed upon but there's this due diligence period. It's like we're in escrow. It's gonna be finalized later this month and then we'll find out what it's really like. Right now, there's still a lot of business stuff to do to wrap it up. To officially stitch the companies together.

Destructoid:Once that does go through, what's the stuff you're looking forward to — I guess the old parts of your job that you just want to let go?

Schafer:Biz dev. I have great biz dev people doing stuff for me but still, I have to get involved with the eternal question of Where's the next chunk of money coming from? How are we going to change what we're doing creatively to go after that money? What are publishers signing these days? Do we have to do stuff like free-to-play? All those kinds of things are gone. Microsoft wanted us to join them so that we'd add our own type of games to their platform and to Game Pass. That's all we have to worry about doing. Just worry about What's the best Double Fine game we can make? That's all we have to think about.


Destructoid:As a privately-owned company for the better part of two decades, what was important for an acquisition to make sense?

Schafer:I asked two questions. First, what would happen to our culture. Would we change our email to be @microsoft? These little things that are really important to me. Would you put up a logo in the lobby? And they don't want to do any of that. They said No, keep everything the way it is. You're Double Fine, you stay Double Fine. It's what Microsoft talks about as being their unplugged studios — Ninja Theory, inExile, and Obsidian. They're still doing their own thing. That makes sense to me. When [head of Xbox Game Studios] Matt Booty told me about that, I could see why it'd make sense for a platform-holder like Microsoft to want a diverse group of creative studios creating content just for their platform. I could see why they wouldn't want to buy us and turn us into a Halo outsourcer. It doesn't make any sense. If you want to buy MMoexp POE currency trade please visit https://www.mmoexp.com/Path-of-exile/Currency.html.