Tim Schafer on Double Fine going independent: 'No one puts Double Fine out of business except me'

Double Fine has gone independent after narrowly avoiding Microsoft's mass layoffs — the same round of 3,200 cuts announced by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma earlier this year. Studio head Tim Schafer spoke to Bloomberg about the split, and he's candid about what pushed them out the door.

Schafer traces the beginning of the end to a visit from Sharma, who arrived in what he calls "listening mode" — but the subtext was clear once she started talking about shifting Xbox's direction. "We had a mutually beneficial mission," he told Bloomberg, "which is just to put great games on Game Pass, and then their mission changed. I can't imagine any amount of profitability — unless we had a breakout, Minecraft hit that year — would've saved us." Rather than bitterness, Schafer sounds energised: "You're like, 'Wait a second, we're not going out like this.' For the rest of us, it's like a creative awakening." Independence wasn't painless, though — just months after leaving Microsoft, Schafer laid off 23 people to secure the studio's survival, a decision he took full personal ownership of rather than letting it happen through a corporate sweep.

Double Fine's post-Psychonauts 2 run has been rocky. Keeper, released in 2025, earned strong critical praise — PC Gamer gave it a 90 — but didn't break through commercially. Kiln, which followed in 2026, peaked at 193 concurrent players on Steam, and at the time of writing had exactly one person playing it. Kiln was primarily a Game Pass title, so Steam numbers don't tell the whole story, but the commercial picture is clearly challenging. Schafer, for his part, remains convinced Keeper has untapped mass-market appeal: "I really think there's a mass market appeal to Keeper. If we could just get to those people, we could have them catch Lighthouse Fever."

Schafer's philosophy on the whole situation is characteristically colourful: "No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me. Asha's not going to shoot my dog. I'm going to shoot it. But I'm not going to shoot it because it's going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog." Whether the newly independent Double Fine can find that audience — and fund itself in the process — is the question hanging over the studio right now.