Double Fine has confirmed it owns – or will shortly own – the intellectual property and publishing rights to every game it made during its seven years under Xbox following the studio’s split from Microsoft earlier this year.
CEO Tim Schafer confirmed the news on Kinda Funny Games (thanks, IGN), fielding a fan question about whether buying Double Fine’s back catalogue – including Psychonauts 2, Keeper, and Kiln – actually puts money in the studio’s pocket.
“I saw a question there: ‘Do you guys make the money on games?'” Schafer said. “The transfer of the IP came back to us, and we get the publishing rights back to all our games.”
That said, “some of [the games]” remain with Xbox for the time being, but Schafer explained that “it just takes a while for it to all process”.
“If you’re curious, buying any of our games helps support the studio,” he emphasised. “We can turn that money into revenue that helps us extend that runway.”
Schafer also revealed Double Fine’s next move will be to revive its Amnesia Fortnight game jam as a Kickstarter campaign, letting backers vote on which prototype becomes the studio’s next full project. The jam is set to run from 31st August through most of September.
It’s the clearest confirmation yet of how Double Fine has come out the other side of Xbox’s restructuring. Xbox’s wider reorganisation, announced by CEO Asha Sharma in July, affected around 3,200 roles across the division and saw several studios, including Double Fine, spun back out into independence while keeping hold of their IP and back catalogues.
Double Fine itself laid off roughly a quarter of its 90-person team as part of the transition, saying at the time that the cuts were needed to reach “a size that we can sustain.”
Compulsion Games, the We Happy Few and South of Midnight studio also cut loose from Xbox in the same restructuring, has similarly confirmed it retains ownership of its IP.
