Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel were the only ones left at Two Tribes by the end of 2013, but Two Tribes Publishing remains strong and continues to sell its catalogue.
Future titles will be released therefore under the Two Tribes name with sales funding new projects for the ‘rebooted’ studio to work on. No more custom engines for the duo.
Their next project is a 2D side scrolling shooter using their Toki Tori 2+ engine, but otherwise they won’t be building their own proprietary technology anymore but instead leverage ”what’s readily available.” Both Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel posted on the studio’s blog about the upcoming reboot for the future of Two Tribes.
”Looking at our busy release schedule you probably wouldn’t have guessed, but in the last two months of 2013 our office has been largely empty,” they began.
There was no programming, no designing, no fun to be had, just co-founders Martijn and Collin taking care of the business end of things. In this case the ‘business end’ can be taken quite literally. The old Two Tribes, founded in 2001, doesn’t exist anymore and we had to send everyone home.”
The facts:
• The old Two Tribes B.V., who employed the developers, is now gone.
• Its parent company, Two Tribes Publishing B.V., that owns and publishes all our games and handles all contracts, remains unaffected.
• A new daughter company has been formed and it will handle the development of future titles.
• The original founders Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel aren’t going anywhere.
”In 2009 we started the transition from doing work for hire to becoming the Indie studio we had always wanted to be. We’re super proud of what we’ve achieved in recent years, but the company that resulted from that transition still held on to too many ideas and values from the old days,” they continued. ”It’s difficult to make fundamental changes, but late October last year we had no other option. When Toki Tori 2 ended up taking way longer than expected and not achieving the sales we needed, it basically took the company down with it.”
”For the outside world nothing much will change. Two Tribes Publishing is still in good shape and all our previous games will remain for sale. With the support of you, our players, the games will supply the funding for our new titles which will be released under the Two Tribes name.”
”We’ve got a ton of hindsight to work with and we’re going to be applying the lessons we learned to the new Two Tribes. Behind the scenes things will change quite a bit. We’ve decided to move away from creating custom technology and focus on what’s readily available. As a result we’ll be working with a much smaller team on our next game, a 2D side scrolling shooter, which will be re-using the existing Toki Tori 2+ engine.”
Check out the full Two Tribes rebooting blog post here.
