There’s been a lot of debate among players during Xbox’s big reset, 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’s top priority was keeping the Game Pass library well stocked with fresh releases. Studios that delivered shouldn’t be the ones to pay the price for a leadership strategy that didn’t pan out.
Some of this conversation has focused on Double Fine, one of the smallest, most oddball studios within the Xbox portfolio. It’s always seemed clear that the team’s 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.
“We never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money,” he said. “I think people would say, ‘Oh, Keeper looks like this art house thing that no one expects to be a hit.’ But to me it’s the kind of game that someone who doesn’t play games would love. 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.”
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’t feel like there’s anything they’d 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’t panned out, but there’s an appealing reasoning to it.
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’ll find a better audience there. The studio head said Double Fine will be looking for work doing potential ports and remasters while it’s incubating its next set of projects.