The Xbox creator has been ”focused elsewhere up until now,” but Schafer remains hopeful they’ll ”change their minds” and be a lot more open to indies. Smaller teams ‘don’t need publishers’.
Schafer points out there are ”too many reasonable and successful alternatives” for indies to capitalise off of, like Steam and mobile.
”Sony has reached out to us and asked us our opinions about what we’d like to see with new platforms and they’ve been really good with indies - allowing them to self-publish and entering into partnerships and stuff like that,” Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine, told Edge.
”Microsoft has been focused elsewhere up until now, I’ve kind of had my fingers crossed that hopefully they’ll change their minds about that because I think it’s really critical.”
Indies can afford to skip certain platforms if they prove difficult, meaning Xbox isn’t a ‘must have’ release.
”Steam is huge, mobile and all of those things are really profitable for indies so there’s too many reasonable and successful alternatives for indies to look towards,” he said. ”We don’t really need to go through the arduous process of acquiring a publisher that we don’t need just to be on a certain platform.”
Kickstarter is another avenue that helps indie groups especially to find the support needed to create their games, and see them self-publish. Schafer is ever wearying of fatigue settling in, especially if crowd-funding is ‘abused’.
”I think some of the Kickstarters are overcomplicated, or seem to be treating it like it’s a store, or milking it for easy money,” added Shafer. ”That’s why we’re putting a lot of thought into this project - it’s not another old timer coming back from the nineties, like me, and not an old game or tried and true licence, but actually a risky and new IP.”
Double Fine has just started a fresh new Kickstarter campaign called Massive Chalice, which is a tactical fantasy strategy game. The studio’s first Kickstarter was for adventure title Broken Age and it raised $3.3 million.
So, Schafer’s message to Microsoft is that smaller developers don’t need to jump hoops like they used to please Microsoft control-freak executives. Either Xbox One evolves to be a lot more open to the indie scene, or they’ll simply go somewhere else they’re made to feel a whole lot more welcome.
