UPDATE: According to a post by Notch on Reddit, £100,000 has been put into the project from him personally.
Original Story: Although we originally thought Epic Games would be publishing Age of Wonders 3 for Triumph Studios, it actually turns out that the game doesn’t have a publisher at all and Minecraft creator Notch, real name Markus Persson, is funding it.
Distribution and co-publishing deals haven’t been ruled out, but because Notch is such a big fan of the franchise and doesn’t have much time to work on publishing it, he’s agreed to help fund it anyway.
Lennart Sas, co-owner and managing director of Triumph, explains how the partnership was formed:
”We noticed Minecraft’s random title-screen blurb mentioned Age of Wonders,” said Sas speaking with Eurogamer. ”so I thought what the heck and I sent Notch an email.
“We had a demo for Age of Wonders 3 and talked to various parties including traditional publishers. There was certainly interest but the prospect of having Notch help fund was a dream come true, as he’s a fan of the game and didn’t insist on owning it like many of the publishers do these days when they fund development.
“It certainly didn’t happen overnight,” he added, ”and he kept a healthy business sense towards the project. His biggest concern was that it would cost him a lot of time, so it helped that we made this sort of game before and were at an advanced stage of development.
“Notch is pretty much hands off. He’s a super busy man, now even more so then when we approached him.”
Triumph decided to opt out of a Kickstarter campaign and went with the more traditional way of development, and the developers will have much more freedom now that Notch is involved and helping to fund it.
Age of Wonders III is due to be released for the PC this autumn. We’ll keep you updated on any further developments when we have them.
