Studio Profile
The Yooka-Laylee creator on becoming a friendlier kind of developer-publisher
From a pair of platforming pals to making Friends around the industry: it’s Playtonic Games
Gavin Price wants to make it clear that Playtonic the developer isn’t going anywhere. The studio has, in fact, some very grand plans, about which we’re sworn to secrecy – suffice it to say, it’s currently working on three games, though we won’t be seeing them for a while. In the meantime, Playtonic the publisher will be keeping itself busy: its new Playtonic Friends label has announced its first raft of games, and Price tells us there will be more to come.
In some ways, it’s a strange time to establish a new part of your business. How has COVID-19 affected Playtonic’s plans? “It’s hard to tell,” Price says. “You can’t reload your quicksave from before it happened and try playing it another way. But in some ways, I think it’s actually helped us. We always said, if we’re going to have [several projects] on the go, we want to have time to slow-cook them. So it’s actually been fine moving to working from home. It’d be horrible, I think, if we had to transition and we were under pressure to ship something pretty immediately. This is the nice phase of development.”
And on the publishing side of the business? “There’s been pros and cons. It must be hard to start a new role for the people who’ve joined us during the pandemic.” As things slowly start to move back to normality, Playtonic is recruiting for two more full-time in-house positions to help it expand, though Price says that side of the studio isn’t ever going to get too large: “We don’t want to become a publisher with a development studio. We’re a developer with a publishing arm. We’re not going to go and sign five more titles each year, then go from five [staff] to ten to 15 to 20. We will be able to stay small and nimble.”
Price says the move to publishing other developers’ games came about as the solution to a different aspiration – from day one, Playtonic wanted to eventually be in a position to self-publish its games, and in fact had already set the ball rolling on that ambition. “But we thought, if we’ve got this self-publishing team as well, for many months of the year they’re just going to be waiting for us. So we thought: actually, why don’t we find some developers?” That, Price says, was not too difficult: “I was speaking to someone at another publisher the other day, and it’s become apparent that there’s way too many brilliant devs and games out there – more than enough to go around all the publishers, we agreed.” And so Playtonic Friends was born.
That name conveys the approach Playtonic is hoping to adopt (it’s perhaps telling that Price tends to use the word ‘partner’ more than ‘publisher’ during our chat), and there’s a recognition that it will only be comfortable taking on projects of a certain size. Not every developer will be a good fit, Price says. “If someone comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we’re a 30-person team, and we’re going to need $10 million for this project’, we’re never going to be the right kind of partner for them to do their game at that scale.” Instead, it’s aiming to be
“THERE’S WAY TOO MANY BRILLIANT
DEVS AND GAMES OUT THERE –
MORE THAN ENOUGH TO GO AROUND”
more boutique, and offer a bespoke service for each game published. “We’re literally saying to people: what do you want us to do? It’s pretty much: give us your shitlist and we’ll go and get it done,” Price laughs.
The first three games announced under the ‘Playtonic Friends Presents…’ banner could hardly be more different from each other. Demon Turf, a 3D platformer with illustrated 2D characters, would seem to be closest to the studio’s wheelhouse. A Little Golf Journey is an adaptation of a relaxing mobile golf game for PC and Switch. And then there’s BPM: Bullets Per Minute, from Awe Interactive – which, having self-published the game on PC, has teamed up with Playtonic for its forthcoming launches on PS4 and Xbox One.
It’s an eclectic mix of experiences, and deliberately so, Price suggests – it should help Playtonic avoid being pigeonholed as a company that’s only interested in making and releasing platformers. When choosing which
teams to work with, he says, genre is the last consideration. “It’s about the game and the quality of the team doing it,” he says. “That’s way more interesting for us, because every time they know they’re going to get a bespoke service. It’s not like we can say, ‘This is how we marketed the last game we did – let’s just copy and paste and do the same job for these people.’” Rather than trying to make things easier by restricting itself to certain types of game, he says, diversifying its approach should only encourage its development partners. “They get that assurance that we’re dedicated to doing something fit for purpose for each game we sign.”
Given the studio’s evident desire to make Yooka-Laylee into more than just a game (Price admits to hoping to see the pair on a Happy Meal box one day), is it looking for developers who might want to take their games down a similar path: not just one-offs, but the start of a series? Price hesitates. “I don’t know if we’re actively looking for it. But it probably occurs naturally anyway. We kind of gravitate toward the developers who want to set themselves up for this long-term sustainability.”
Another consideration is something more straightforward, but not often mentioned by the developer-publishers we’ve spoken to.
“A lot of the people we talk to are young, and a lot of them have played our games, and we’ve played theirs and that’s great,” Price says. “We really value how we get on with the people we talk to during that phase. A lot of attention is paid to that – almost more than the game itself, in a way!”
With so many Rare alumni at the studio, it would be more surprising to find a developer
who hadn’t played its games – and that experience is no doubt part of the appeal of Playtonic. In particular, Price says, that makes it feel like a safe pair of hands for younger studios that are in the early stages of existence. “In some cases, they just need a partner to help them get the message out, but we do provide some dev assistance ourselves, such as optimisation and porting. One of the benefits of being old is that we’ve been around the block on a lot of games,” he smiles.
That, he says, automatically gives Playtonic a certain credibility – it can tell developers what has and hasn’t worked for it in the past, and what it would have done differently. And, as all game developers are aware, there are always new things to learn in such a fastmoving industry. Price acknowledges that the studio has come a long way in recent years, particularly with regard to Unity – Playtonic invested a lot of time, he says, in making sure 2019’s Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair ran at 60fps docked and undocked on Switch.
If harnessing its technical expertise is part of the service Playtonic Friends provides, it’s also aiming to become a more approachable kind of publisher. When people come to Playtonic, Price says, it tries to offer the kind of deal it would want as a developer: “We’re so developer-biased, even to the detriment of our own publishing terms”. The publishing arm, he says, is about much more than just the studio’s growth and bottom line. “It’s about the fact that we can help people along the way. And yeah, we get to make some profit, which covers our own self-publishing aspirations as well, in due course. But it’s so easy to create really nice win-wins for everybody, to keep everyone’s stress levels down and say, you know what, it’s not about that extra few quid that either side could be making. It’s about how we’re going to make what is a nice amount anyway, that hopefully can set other developers up for longterm sustainability.”
Indeed, quite a few of the developers he’s working with, Price says, are hoping that this is the deal that allows them to operate full-time in the game industry; for some, this is still only a side hustle. “They’re putting in so much time and effort, juggling two jobs and hoping that they can have the dream of being full-time game developers. It’s really nice that we’re helping people like that.” If its approach as a publisher is tailored to the developer’s needs, its terms are consistent. “It’s based on the same criteria, and again, it puts them first. If we 100 per cent fund, for example, we’ll split revenues with the developer before we’ve recouped. We’ll start sharing immediately. If they have 100 per cent funded, we don’t take anything until they’ve got their recoup back. And then we start sharing.” As for its level of creative involvement, Price says it’s hands-off until it’s asked not to be, and then it will lend its expertise and provide feedback. It will look at builds when its development partners want to present them, rather than setting milestones. “We keep putting money in their bank account when we said we would,” he says. “We’re not going” – and here he takes a sharp intake of breath and shakes his head – “‘Ooh, it’s not quite in yet, is it?’ And wagging our finger. There’s none of that. If anyone tried to do that with us, we would not get on with them as a publisher, so we wouldn’t do that to others.”
Price cites Thunderful and Mediatonic as the developer-publisher ideal, acknowledging that Playtonic will probably continue to work with publishers for its own games, at least for the next few years. “They seem to have this common-sense approach of: well, actually, we could self-publish this, but if we partnered with this publisher, they’re right for this game more than us,” he says. “We wouldn’t just assume blindly we’re the right publisher for our own
“IT’S SO EASY TO CREATE REALLY NICE
WIN-WINS FOR EVERYBODY, TO KEEP
EVERYONE’S STRESS LEVELS DOWN”
games. And there’s also co-publishing that we would like to look into, particularly when physical retail releases are involved. We’re never going to be a physical publisher.”
It’s refreshing to hear a studio so keenly aware of its strengths and equally comfortable acknowledging the areas in which it can’t quite compete with others. Yet with Price suggesting Playtonic may open another studio to broaden its talent pool, it’s clear it has big plans for the coming years. And if that Happy Meal deal might be a way off yet, the developer’s other ambition certainly doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility: “Playtonic is pretty much us saying to ourselves, ‘What were the best things about Rare with Nintendo and Microsoft?’ And trying to put all the positives of both those eras together.”
Q