There is some news about Double Fine though, both good and bad. Bad news first: Tim Schafer said that EA passed on Brutal Legend 2, so that's definitely not happening anytime soon. I believe Double Fine owns the rights themselves because EA put it out through the Partners program, but they'd have to shop it around to other publishers and it sounds like they're not interested in doing that right now. That's certainly a bummer: though it undeniably has flaws, I thought Brutal Legend was a sharply funny and extremely unique game bought down by a combination of external business dealings and mismanaged consumer expectations.
However, while BL was in publisher limbo, Schafer apparently held an internal game design competition within Double Fine, because they basically had nothing to do anyway. When EA passed on BL2, they were sort of scrambling to figure out their next project, and ended up converting the entries people came up with into 4 separate prototypes and decided to shop those around. Schafer was apparently expecting one or possibly two to get picked up, but apparently all 4 have gotten publishing deals, so Double Fine as a studio is still in business for the near future. We don't know anything about the individual games except that apparently some will be downloadable (although at least one is still a traditional retail game), but all 4 are significantly lower budget than Brutal Legend. I think this is probably a healthier model for Schafer's games, to be honest: as funny and excellent as they all are, they've always struggled commercially. Lowering the budget risk for publishers while still leveraging Schafer's name recognition seems to be the best way for Double Fine to keep running successfully. And on the plus side for us, now there will be four times as many games with Schafer's writing in them coming out.
