Or they actually hop on and help with a piece of a project.” Kepler raised $120 million in funding in September last year. “And it's not like they need to be brought on as an official consultant or anything, people will just play each other's builds and give genuine feedback - in small ways like that. “If a particular studio has expertise, they're very willing to help another studio,” he explains. One key benefit the creative director and CEO feels is especially helpful to everyone is the sharing of knowledge. In practice, the values of Kepler translate to more than just a sense of ownership of the partner teams. Everyone feels like you have that sort of sense of investment that you've always had with your company that you created and kind of brought up, and they've sort of transferred that care through to the wider group.” “So, giving each of the studios a piece of Kepler as part of them joining is such an interesting proposition overall. If Kepler does better, we all do better,” he breaks it down. “I’d say the biggest thing, philosophically, is that every studio that's joined - and I think it's got a lot to do with the types of personalities and studios that Kepler picks as well - but everybody has the sense of a united goal. “I think it's an exceptional experiment,” Bradley tells me. Flintlock, however, has an altogether different arrangement - and it's the subject of this piece.Īs you might imagine, this is a rare model for publisher-developer relations, and I was keen to find out more about how it all works.Īs part of our interview with A44 CEO Derek Bradley, we talked a great deal about Flintlock and the studio's AAA ambitions, and touched on the myth of games not selling on Xbox through the lens of A44's history with Game Pass. The label is made up of several high-profile indie studios.Īshen and Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn developer A44 - together with Ebb Software (Scorn), Sloclap (Sifu), Timberline (The Red Lantern), Awaceb (Tchia), Alpha Channel (Tankhead), and Shapefarm - are all co-owners and stakeholders of Kepler, a publishing label that is run by all of its partner developers.Ī44's first game, Ashen, had a more traditional publishing agreement with Annapurna Interactive one of the most prolific, eclectic game publishers in the business. Kepler Interactive operates an interesting model that could best be described as co-op publishing. But one in particular is unique in the opportunities it offers developers, and in the way it's set up. Game publishing, in particular, has seen so many new and evolving models in just the last five years. The business of video games changes so much that it can sometimes be hard to keep up with.
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