Earlier this week, South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games shared word that they now own all of the publishing rights to their games, a welcome update in light of the ongoing BDS boycott against Microsoft and Xbox. And now, another studio is joining the realm of boycott freedom, this time Psychonauts studio Double Fine, as CEO Tim Schafer has confirmed that they too now own the publishing rights to their own catalogue.
Speaking on Kinda Funny Games Daily (ta, Kotaku), Schafer said, “the transfer of the IP came back to us. We have the publishing rights back to our games. It still says ‘Microsoft’ on some of them, but it just takes a while for it all to process. When people buy our games, it supports the studio. So if you’re curious, buying any of our games helps support the studio, and we can turn that money into revenue that helps us extend that runway.”
Double Fine’s Future REVEALED W/ Tim Schafer – Kinda Funny Games Daily 08.21.26
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That’s not the only spot of good news, as Double Fine are planning to bring back their Amnesia Fortnight Game Jam. “Being independent again, we can go back to do a lot of things we were doing before. Like crazy game jams, like our Amnesia Fortnight Game Jam where we split into small groups and we make a game in two weeks…Game jams and, you know, we got a little bit of runway on the departure to sign some games. We want to sign some game deals, get going, it’s kind of a scary time to be out there. It’s a runway, not a freeway, it doesn’t go forever. It’s just a little patch where we can take off on our own power, and we want to extend it a little bit.”
In fact, the studio is hosting a Kickstarter for the return of this game jam, which kicks off August 31st. As Schafer explains, “if you join the Kickstarter, you get to vote, you get to hear all the teams pitch. Everyone at Double Fine gets to pitch a game. And if you join that, you get to help vote for which one we actually make, and we’ll make like four of them, and then you get to vote on which one we [work on] for a little bit longer to polish up and actually release.”
As nice as it is to see Double Fine return to their indie roots, this does unfortunately come a month after they laid off a quarter of their staff, which obviously came as a result of their independence from Xbox. Hopefully those devs manage to land on their feet, and the remaining devs at Double Fine continue to keep the lights on.
