Tim Schafer Reserving Judgment on Xbox One Till E3, “Flexibility in Self-Publishing” Important

Double Fine Productions founder Tim Schafer had plenty to say about the next generation of consoles, namely the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. He also spoke about how, despite working on titles like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend for the current generation platforms, future games like Broken Age and Massive Chalice will only be on PC, Mac and Linux.

Speaking to GamesIndustry International, Schafer stated that, “It’s about flexibility in self-publishing. When you do Kickstarter, you publish on your own. Steam is so reasonable about letting you self-publish. Some of the console owners like Nintendo and Sony have made a lot of advances in that as well.

“Double Fine is pretty platform agnostic. We want to be everywhere. It really is based on what platforms we can self-publish on. I think there’s a lot more interest in PC, Mac, and Linux, as we start to bring our engines to those platforms.”

He also talked about how, “[Sony] reached out to a lot of indies like us and wanted to talk about what our needs were for the next platform. What we’d like to see, if we’d like to do stuff for it. Sony has definitely been putting a lot of energy into getting to know indies. Nintendo has also been forthright about letting us know how we can get involved.

“The optimistic part of me is thinking that [Microsoft is] holding off on announcing their new, indie-friendly platform policy and they’re going to tell us all about it at E3. I’m going to reserve judgment until after E3.”