Double Fine’s Schafer: ‘We’ve been Talking with Sony’ on PS4

Double Fine boss Tim Schafer has spoken to the Official PlayStation Magazine about talking to Sony and working on PS4.

Schafer said the studio was approached by Sony who asked what they wanted to see from "this new box." The veteran developer went on to add that "we've already got some guys playing with some of the new features to see what we can do with it."

Making his comments at the recent PAX East Schafer commented "Let me just say we've been talking with Sony, can I say that? I don't know, I think I might get in trouble."

Schafer said it was surprising to be approached directly by Sony concerning the PS4 "because we're not Bungie, or let me put that in PlayStation terms, we're not Insomniac."

Of course, both Bungie and Insomniac are now multi-platform developers despite their long term association with Xbox and PlayStation respectively.

"This is one of the first times we've been approached by a platform holder like Sony and asked, 'first, we have this feature, what could you do with it?'" Schafer said. "We've already got some guys playing with some of the features to see what they can do with it."

Talking about Sony's more developer-centric approach with the PlayStation 4 Shacfer noted "it's not that hard to win over developers because all we want is to be treated with a little bit of reason. Because often you just get the most unreasonable, crazy things and you're like 'really? That's how you're going to treat us?' Just letting us do things like patch our games when we want to, put our games on sale and release our games in territories they should be released in – just doing a few things like that can make a developer very enarmoured with you."

Double Fine's recent games, such as Stacking, have been self published and Schafer dismissed the notion of returning to a more traditional publisher-developer model saying "You can't put us back in the bottle now, the genie's out!" 

Epic's Mark Rein has meanwhile hailed the PS4 as "like being given the world's best PC."