Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios, who are also busy with the open-world Mad Max, are turning more of their studio’s focus to self-publishing. In fact The Hunter is ”contributing quite a lot” to them.
It’s given the Swedish developer ”control our own destiny” being in direct contact with players, but they aren’t shying away from further deals with big publishers like Square Enix.
”We are shifting a little bit of our focus to more self-publishing which will be quite interesting,” co-founder Christofer Sundberg told Game Informer in an interview.
”We’re not really there yet. We had a great experience working with The Hunter. If you look at our financial numbers The Hunter is actually contributing quite a lot to our financial success. We’re in that fortunate position to be able to control our own destiny and having that direct connection with our players is very important to the studio. So that’s definitely where I see our future.”
The Hunter is a free-to-play shooter that attempts to realistically recreate the experience of hunting wildlife, and recently spawned a pre-historic spin-off called theHunter: Primal.
”But on the other side we have a great partnership with Square Enix and our other publishers who we work with,” said Sundberg , ”and it’s something that we would like to continue working on as well.”
Avalanche will also be spending more resources on creating new IPs, he revealed, given how important it is for developers to retain control of what they create.
”That’s why most developers are in this business to create your own ideas,” he said. ”For us it’s super important. Everybody has a lot of ideas and it takes time to get those ideas to become reality. Sometimes the ideas you might have when we pitch a game to a publisher, we can come up how we want to do this type of game. And they say well we have this license that you might want to apply that idea on, and that’s usually how it ends up.”
”I think every developer in the world is being driven by creating your own ideas. That’s the fun part of game development, and owning that creative process and really be able to make your own dreams become real.”
Sundberg continued: ”We have a huge catalogue of old ideas that we want to bring to life and obviously come up with a few new ones. But definitely focus on doing something original again.”
Just Cause 3 has been revealed to be in the works at Avalanche, which has long been rumoured to exist, but so is the ambitious Mad Max for publisher Warner Bros. Both are due out in 2015.
