Double Fine are a popular developer with a lot of love from the Internet, if not the mainstream public. And being an Internet favourite means that they are hounded day in and day out about making a sequel to one of their most beloved games, Psychonauts. The problem? Psychonauts tanked at retail when it launched. It’s since become a cult classic, but it tanked at retail and this makes publishers wary about funding a sequel.
This is something that Greg Rice, producer on Double Fine Adventure, explained when interviewed by VG247. They asked him how it felt to have constant requests for a Psychonauts sequel and he responded thusly:
Yeah that’s definitely flattering, and Tim has ideas for sequels to every game we’ve ever made. I think it always comes down to what kind of studio resources are available, and who’s available to make games. But yes, Psychonauts 2 is something that comes up a lot, and it’s something that we’d definitely be interested in doing. It’d just be a large game, and that’d mean pretty much the entire studio working on it for multiple years, so it’s just a matter of finding funding and finding out how to take it forward.
Rice was then questioned on most fan’s beliefs of sequels being nothing but cash cows, games made purely to keep the company afloat. He explained how this doesn’t always occur.
It’s not so much that we’d make games to make money, the real issue is having the money to make the game. It’s not like, ‘oh yeah, we want to make Psychonauts 2.’ Well, someone has to pay us a ton of money to make us rich first. We need that money to pay our employees so that we can have them around and have their salaries paid while we make the game.
He concluded the subject with the following: “I think there are definitely more Psychonauts stories to be told and Tim has them in mind. Obviously fans like the game and we’d love to revisit the franchise too, and…we love it as well.”
So, Double Fine would love to make that Psychonauts sequel, but money is an obstacle. And don’t think that Kickstarter would solve the problem. To make a full sequel to Psychonauts, particularly one for modern day consoles, it’d probably cost a lot more than the $3.3 million they raised for Double Fine Adventure, let alone the $400,000 target the project started off with. So, for now, we must instead sit and sulk over how unfair the universe is. Like we do every day that a Psychonauts sequel isn’t in development.
Via: The Escapist, VG247