During the ‘Great THQ Acquisition of 2013‘ (as I am calling it) all of THQ’s assets were sold off at auction. Unfortunately for some developers this meant some of the games they worked on now belonged to another company and without the distribution rights they would not get much money from developing a sequel.
Double Fine do not want this to be a possibility. During the THQ auction they lost their distribution rights to titles Stacking and Costume Quest to Nordic Games and Tim Schafer gave a revealing interview about why they want them back.
“It’s not, like, a lot of money; it’s mostly for us to just tidy up things. And also an emotional attachment – more of a mission of Double Fine to own everything that we make,” he said.
“It’s, like, this loose end that kind of bothers me that we’d like to tie up. It’s frustrating when something’s really valuable to you for emotional reasons, and not that valuable to anyone else,” he said.
“Because they can still say, ‘Well, how much do you want it for?’ and it’s, like, ‘Aw, you know this isn’t valuable to you.’ It’s valuable to me, but not for business reasons, in a sense.”
I can totally understand where Tim Schafer is coming from, to own the IP but not to not be able to properly create a sequel must be very frustrating. Hopefully at some point they can buy the rights to their titles and can build on both properties. Stacking and Costume Quest are both unique, interesting games so it would be a shame if we never saw anything from them again.
What do you guys think of Double Fine’s stance on this topic? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below.
