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jbernardo writes:

3 years ago, Double Fine started a crowdfunding campaign in fig to fund the second instalment of their successful game, Psychonauts. While it was known all along that the some of the funds for the game development would come from the publisher, backers were surprised with a paragraph almost hidden in the middle of the latest blog announcement:

We then snuck past Keanu to announce that we would be joining Xbox Game Studios, and that Psychonauts 2 would be published by Microsoft (instead of Starbreeze) as a first party title. [www.fig.co]

While the first comments on the blog post expressed concern by the backers on the impact of Microsoft acquisition, the later comments all read very similar, claiming that this acquisition will have a good impact, and trying to minimise also the impact of the additional delay (Psychonauts 2 should have been released by the end of 2018, is now delayed at least until the end of 2019).

In the same post, there is a promise to still launch on other platforms, such as PS4, that were promised from the beginning; but there is a real risk of these platforms becoming "second class citizens" very quickly, now that Microsoft calls the shots. And becoming part of a behemoth won't do any good to Double Fine's originality.

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