Double Fine boss, Tim Schafer believes pubisher are unwilling to invest in unproven franchises, making developers of new IP’s job ever more difficult. Schafer believes developing studios have a better chance with smaller titles.
Schafer told Digital Spy [as sited by GIBiz] that, “Publishers often don’t want to release anything new,” and that the publishers are “scared” of new IP.
“That’s always been our challenge, is getting a publisher to invest millions of dollars in something brand new like Brutal Legend.”
“It has helped to have games that are smaller, like digital download games are smaller so the budgets are smaller, like Happy Action Theater. The whole reason it got made was that I was asking for very little money to get it made,” Schafer continued.
While Double Fine’s Brutal Legend was fairly popular amongst gamers and received well with the critics, it still managed to not become economically viable to merit a sequel. So Double Fine then turned to a smaller project, Happy Action Theater which can now be found on the Xbox Live Arcade.
