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Tim Schafer has changed the rules for funding major game projects. Now he is making good on his promise to communicate status updates directly to his fan base.
After collecting more than $1.8 million in crowd-sourced Kickstarter funding for a new videogame, Double Fine Studios founder Tim Schafer has published a video update for the “backers of adventure”. He reveals that the game will be released for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, as well as the mobile platforms iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android.
The increased budget will pay for English voiceovers and translations of the on-screen text into French, Italian, German and Spanish. Schafer also announced that backers of the project will be able to get a version of the final game, which is completely free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection. Access to beta versions prior to release will be made available on the Steam network only.
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Details about new high-profile video games still under development are usually shrouded in secrecy, with new information carefully trickled through PR channels. But Schafer has promised “an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form” and it will be interesting to follow future public announcements about the game’s progress.
Fans of Schafer’s body of work have also been hoping for a sequel to his 2005 action-adventure Psychonauts. In a recent Twitter exchange with Schafer, Minecraft programmer Markus “Notch” Persson expressed his interest in helping to fund the project. But in a new post on his personal blog, Persson clarified that he has “NO idea if this is actually going to happen.” The budget for Psychonauts 2 would be three times higher than he had originally anticipated. According to Kotaku, it would be in the range of $13 million.
Persson is hoping to meet Schafer during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in early March for further discussions. But he points out that “Double Fine will be very busy for many months with the Kickstarter project” and wishes “Stop hyping over this, internet!” (good luck with that).
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFKwplDBmgg]
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