To many on the outside, going indie in the games industry seems like the perfect chance to get all wacky with your ideas. There's no CEO or investors making decisions for you, so you can throw any idea at the wall and see what sticks. Do you want 700 different enemy types? Just go for it!
That's not reflective of reality, though. Despite how prominent and well known of an indie studio that you might be, money will always be a concern. Just ask Double Fine, the studio behind such hit games like Psychonauts and Broken Age. Its upcoming title, Psychonauts 2, may have smashed crowdfunding records, but funds were running low and things needed to get cut.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Double Fine founder Tim Schafer revealed that before Microsoft's purchase of the company, cuts had to be made in Psychonauts 2 to finish the project. "With Psychonauts 2, we could see the end of our budget coming up, and so we had cut a lot of stuff. We had cut our boss fights."
The lack of boss encounters would obviously be noticeable to fans, but there wasn't much else for Double Fine to do. Either the company would have to find a publisher and risk losing what made Psychonauts so original, or it could steer the course and make the necessary cuts. When Microsoft offered to buy the company, Schafer wasn't initially interested but found the proposition of Xbox Game Pass intriguing.
"When they first started talking to us about acquiring studios, we said we are not looking to sell," Schafer recalls. "But going up and having lunch with Mr. Booty, and hearing the vision for his business and Game Pass...I started to see two things that were important to me...With Game Pass, it wouldn't make sense to acquire Double Fine and then assign us a bunch of Forza DLC. That's not what you'd want from a studio like Double Fine."
In the end, the two companies found that their respective philosophies were compatible. Microsoft wanted to get a plethora of unique content on its platform and subscription service while Double Fine wanted to continue being weird. It was a match made in heaven.
Source: GamesIndustry.biz