But, if you go back to why Double Fine Presents existed, a lot of it came about because there's so many games and it's really hard for any individual game now to get a lot of attention for itself. We've been around for a long time, helping people run their Kickstarters and giving advice here and there. People like [vice president of business] Greg [Rice]. We've both been through a lot of deals, seen how they happen, how platform-holders operate, how the press works POE currency trade . All these different things that maybe a first-time indie dev doesn't know about. We thought we could help them with that and also kind of pick our favorite games and give them more exposure. Whether or not we're still hands-on publishing those games ourselves, we can still be fulfilling that mission of just helping indie devs even though we're a part of Microsoft.
We can also still do things like Day of the Devs which is another part of Double Fine Presents that helps elevate 70 or 80 games, and we let people come meet those developers and play those games, and it's free to the public. It's a great way to approach that same mission, and we can still do that without officially putting our name on it and taking a share of the revenue. We don't have to do that anymore.
Destructoid:Psychonauts seems like a bigger project compared to other recent games of Double Fine's — from a budget and personnel standpoint. Moving forward, do you want to go back to projects that are smaller in scope–
Schafer:Yes!
Destructoid:Really?
Schafer:Yes! [laughing]
Destructoid:So, you want to go back to things that are more along the lines of like Rad or Headlander?
Schafer:Only because I like to do the opposite of what I last did. When we did Broken Age, I really like that game but afterward I was like I want to make a big world. I want to make a big world to explore again. Now we're making Psychonauts. After Psychonauts, I want to do the opposite. I want to make something really small. I just naturally cycle back and forth between things like Psychonauts and Brutal Legend which are really opposite. Just try different things. When you're doing something creative, I think it's natural to try to do the opposite. Especially when something takes four years to POE currency make.
