{"id":837265,"date":"2026-09-05T11:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T11:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/837265\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T11:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T11:02:13","slug":"double-fine-boss-says-we-never-actively-tried-to-make-a-game-we-thought-was-going-to-lose-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/837265\/","title":{"rendered":"Double Fine Boss Says ‘We Never Actively Tried To Make A Game We Thought Was Going To Lose Money’"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a lot of debate among players during Xbox\u2019s big reset<\/a>, which includes 3,200 layoffs, about whose fault it is and about the failure of Game Pass. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has framed it as an unfortunate necessity amid dwindling profits. Others have pointed out that for years Xbox\u2019s top priority was keeping the Game Pass library well stocked with fresh releases. Studios that delivered shouldn\u2019t be the ones to pay the price for a leadership strategy that didn\u2019t pan out.<\/p>\n

Some of this conversation has focused on Double Fine, one of the smallest, most oddball studios within the Xbox portfolio. It\u2019s always seemed clear that the team\u2019s games sold poorly. Was that because Double Fine had free rein to make whatever it wanted and chose to bet on niche ideas without broad appeal? Founder and CEO Tim Schafer pushed back on that sort of framing in a new interview with Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money,\u201d he said. \u201cI think people would say, \u2018Oh, Keeper\u00a0looks like this art house thing that no one expects to be a hit.\u2019 But to me it\u2019s the kind of game that someone who doesn\u2019t play games would love. I really think there\u2019s a mass market appeal to\u00a0Keeper. If we could just get to those people, we could have them catch Lighthouse Fever.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has a point. The idea of Game Pass was to drive subscriber growth and make revenue predictable rather than ride the traditional boom-and-bust cycle of the hit-driven gaming business. One way to drive subscriber growth is to reach people who think games are mostly just Madden and Call of Duty and don\u2019t feel like there\u2019s anything they\u2019d actually like to play. In that regard, Game Pass can be an extremely effective way of trying to get lots of different types of games in front of lots of different people. The strategy hasn\u2019t panned out, but there\u2019s an appealing reasoning to it.<\/p>\n

Schafer told Bloomberg he still thinks Kiln could take off. I would not take that bet, but Keeper was shadow-dropped on PlayStation 5 this week. Maybe it\u2019ll find a better audience there. The studio head said Double Fine will be looking for work doing potential ports and remasters while it\u2019s incubating its next set of projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s been a lot of debate among players during Xbox\u2019s big reset, which includes 3,200 layoffs, about whose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[129246,23242,74,1298],"class_list":["post-837265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-double-fine","tag-keeper","tag-technology","tag-xbox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}