Destructoid:As a privately-owned company for the better part of two decades, what was important for an acquisition to POE currency trade 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.
The second thing was like Are we protected? I wanted to make sure that we don't just disappear overnight. That's always a worry, but I feel like I take them for their word that they want to do this and that they're very serious about it. They seem to have a nice long-term strategy that I believe in about how to adapt to this new world of subscription models and all that.
Destructoid:You mentioned that they don't want to change the studio culture, and you don't want to change the studio culture. That's all presumed to kind of be from the development side. Do you guys still plan to publish indies or is the Double Fine Presents program being sunsetted with Samurai Gunn 2?
Schafer:Well, that's a great question because how Double Fine Presents will evolve is kind of an unknown. It doesn't make sense to do exactly the kind of publishing stuff if we can't do it– like if the platforms are limited POE currency . From a business sense, I don't know if it structurally makes sense to have a publisher within [another publisher]. It's a complicated issue.