League of their own
How Private Division is staking a claim for ‘the new middle’ with two of 2019’s most adventurous new games
Publishing label Private Division stakes a claim for the new middle
You don’t hear so much talk about the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ these days. Sure, between bedrooms and blockbusters can still be a risky place to be: a no-man’s-land where mid-tier games struggle to gain traction, lacking the development and marketing budgets to compete with the big boys, and with overheads higher than indie teams who don’t need millions of sales to stay in business. And yet that niche seems to be widening. The recent spate of Japanese hits is testament to that, and as the ambitions of successful indies grow, and as high-profile developers leave major franchises to pursue smaller-scale projects, a new wave of publishers is stepping in to help these studios realise their visions. Enter Private Division. Conceived by Take Two ’s Michael Worosz and Ed Tomaszewski, the subsidiary’s existence was officially announced just over a year ago, in December 2017. But by then it had already been in operation for two years. Allen Murray, an industry veteran with experience at Bungie and PopCap, among others, recalls first meeting with the two in 2015, as the indie studio he’d been running, AtomJack, was shuttered. “When I let them know about the decision to close down, the conversation shifted to, ‘Well, we actually need some help to get this new initiative off the ground.’” Murray tells us. “Over a period of months we found that we had a lot in common and I came on board towards the end of the year. Essentially I was employee number one for the label.”
Technically, Private Division’s first game was Kerbal Space Program, though Squad’s widely admired spacescience sim is something of an anomaly among the new publisher’s portfolio, being an already released game that was subsequently bought by its parent company. Still, Private Division was responsible for the Enhanced Edition that launched on consoles in early 2018. “Just looking around at where that IP and the management of it might lie, it made a lot of sense that it would fit in Private Division. It also helped that our head of business development, Ed Tomaszewski, was the one that really spearheaded that acquisition.” And Murray suggests its journey is far from over: “It’s a wonderful franchise that we think could grow a lot more.”
It was, in other words, the right size: at the lower end of the Goldilocks zone between the smallest of indies and the kind of game that Take Two would normally publish. “There are actually quite a lot of developers that want to enter into this space,” Murray says. So what to call it? “We still haven’t quite figured out a name for it yet,” he says, frowning at the idea of popular buzzwords like ‘double-A’ or ‘triple-I’. “I just tell people it’s kind of a ‘new middle’.” Though it’s not really a new sector, is it? “Yeah, it’s been around for a while. But a lot of people are now coming back into it and seeing there can be a viable business there.”
People such as Patrice Désilets, for example, whose thirdperson prehistoric survival adventure Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey will be published by Private Division this year. Or Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, the Fallout creators who are making sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds at Obsidian, also due in 2019. Both are passion projects from veteran developers, though it’s not what they have in common that made it the right decision to reveal them both on the same day. “One of the things we like about announcing these two together is that they’re so different,” Murray says. “Both will have very different marketing and PR plans to really highlight the kind of games that they are.”
Indeed, the publisher is particularly keen to be adaptable, tailoring its approach so that it’s appropriate to the very different types and scales of games and developers with which it plans to work. Even a game’s marketing will be guided somewhat by the studio itself, though one rule is that both marketing and PR are included from day one of discussions. “There may not be a lot to talk about in terms of actions to take, but they’re sitting on the calls, listening and learning,” Murray explains. “And so months later when it is time to get more involved, they’ve been a part of that conversation. They have those relationships, so they really understand the game well.”
And it seems the understanding is mutual. Désilets’ Montreal-based startup, Panache Digital, was brand new when it started working with Private Division. In fact, the studio hadn’t even been built
The publisher tailors its approach to the very different types and scales of games with which it plans to work
yet. “The physical space was still under construction,” Désilets tells us. “Panache was six people at the time, but they were really interested in working with me. It was clear to me what they wanted to build, which was a neat space for people like me to express themselves, basically – giving me the means to come up with the playable game of my initial vision.” Désilets was impressed by a rather less formal approach than that to which he’d become accustomed. “When you start a discussion with a partner, you know it’s going to be hard because right away you talk about legal and whatnot. This was just like, ‘Oh, let’s have a nice lunch, we’ll have some fun and then see if business can happen.”
Panache has since grown to more than 30 people, and it’s a similar deal with V1 Interactive, the studio formed by
Halo’s creative art director Marcus Lehto, now going it alone after 15 years at Bungie. “It was just him and a partner when we started working with them; they didn’t even have an office or anything,” Murray says. “So some of our first milestones were just helping them find an office and get computers and desks.”
At the other end of the scale are established studios like Obsidian, where such concerns are firmly in their past, but which still needs a publisher that will respect its ideas. Cain and Boyarsky, who worked together on the original Fallout, have teamed up again for The
Outer Worlds, a reactive, systems-led sci-fi RPG whose complex, interlocking systems are capable of throwing up innumerable variables. As a result, Obsidian has relied heavily upon Private Division’s QA team, with a group of testers dedicated specifically to playing new builds of the game. Cain is effusive in his praise for the publisher’s efforts. “They’ve been wonderful,” he says. “Everybody there understands what we’re trying to make and they help us do that. They have this QA team who we’ve been sending game drops to along with test planets because this game has a lot of ways you can play it. And they’ve been really good at testing all the different paths and coming back and telling us what worked and what didn’t.” Boyarsky agrees. “It’s been great. Sometimes when you’re dealing with thirdparties and other publishers, they see something in your game that’s not the game you’re making, and they want to take a different direction. But Private Division really seemed to grasp what we wanted to do, and were very excited about it.”
That excitement is important to Murray. In its early days, before Private Division had even been named, he described his team’s approach as ‘light touch’ to developers. This was down to his past experiences making games, having worked with larger publishers who would embed dozens of people within a team. This didn’t fit with his personal philosophy, but he also knew he didn’t have the resources to do that either. And yet over time, the publisher has evolved, so now each game has its own “internal champion”, in Murray’s words: someone dedicated to individual games that can become more deeply involved and function as more of a partner, as opposed to a more orthodox developer-publisher relationship. In determining how roles are assigned, he says, it’s down to a blend of personality and passion. Kari Toyama, for example, with whom Murray worked for more a decade at Bungie and PopCap, is now the producer of Ancestors. “That’s because when she saw the game she just said, ‘I love it’,” he says. “I brought her out to meet Patrice and she loved the team and so I asked if she wanted to work on it. I want to find people on the team that can champion these games and really understand the developer and work closely with them.”
If Murray can afford to be picky about the games Private Division publishes, he’s also keen to try to find a home for those he turns down. If a project is too small, he’s only too happy to recommend them to others. Too big, and there’s a chance he might well talk to his colleagues at 2K. The decision usually comes down to a single question: “Would we be able to support them in the way that they would need to be supported? I don’t want to sign up to fail, so yeah, we’re very conscious of that.” And yes, of course, weighing creativity against commercial prospects is a vital part of the equation. “I mean, let’s be transparent. We are a game publisher, so the end goal is that we can make some money for ourselves and the developers. We definitely look for commercial products and sometimes I have very frank conversations with people about that.”
“We know what it’s like to come in with your idea – your baby – and say, ‘Here. Here’s what I’m thinking’”
Yet for all that it’s hoping for hits, at the heart of Private Division is a love of games and a desire to help developers’ dreams come to fruition. “We can really say we’ve sat in that chair and we know what it’s like to come in with your idea – your baby – and say, ‘Here. Here’s what I’m thinking,’” he says. “I know from my point of view there isn’t a single meeting I have with a developer where I’m not really appreciative that they even have the courage to do this, and that they’re talking to us. It’s a privilege for us to be there. I’m always really excited by that.”