Are we in this thing alone, or are we in it together?
The theme of the 2010s in videogames has been one of separation; of the magic that can happen when developers choose their own adventures, turning their backs on big publishers and striking out on their own. Many of the biggest games of the decade have been born not in the boardroom but the bedroom, made free from corporate interference and finding success through hard work and word of mouth.
Yet with the decade running down, perhaps that is changing. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the first Edge of 2019 is characterised by the spirit of collaboration; of creatives working together to reach some higher plane, instead of standing alone. In Hype, we check in on the new game from Simogo. It is one of Edge’s favourite developers, the maker of some of the finest games ever to grace the App Store. But mobile’s a tough gig for a small Swedish indie. Its new game, to be released for Switch through arthouse publisher Annapurna, looks like finally finding the audience the studio has long deserved.
In Knowledge, we pull back the curtain on Private Division, a new publishing label set up by Take Two. Its business model is finding cool concepts with lofty goals, made by small teams to mid-sized budgets, and providing the support they need, not only in finance and logistics but on the dev side too, to help bring their ideas to life.
Yet nowhere is the spirit of collaboration made more clear than it is in our cover story. Kingdom Hearts began, famously, in a lift: Square shared an office building with Disney’s Japanese HQ, and one morning a collaboration was suggested. These days, things are somewhat more protracted. Kingdom Hearts III has been in development for over a decade. It is the work of two very different creative companies, each working to exacting standards, passing their work back and forth and finessing it into something worthy of both their names. It’s a recipe for disaster, really, yet it’s somehow (almost) here. Our story begins on p56.