Yooka-Laylee Studio Playtonic Celebrates Six Years In The Biz With New Publishing Label
© Playtonic GamesYooka-Laylee developer Playtonic turns six this year – and is marking the occasion by showing off a brand-new logo and by launching a new publishing label which aims to bring some of the world’s best Indie games to market.
Playtonic Friends is the name of the new label, and it already has three partners involved – Bedfordshire-based Awe Interactive, New York studio Fabraz and international outfit okidokico.
Awe created BPM: Bullets Per Minute, which has previously been mooted for release on Switch, while Fabraz will be famous with Switch owners for Slime-san. Meanwhile, okidokico is the outfit behind the smartphone-based OK Golf series, and is spread across Montreal, Geneva and Tokyo.
Gavin Price, Playtonic CEO, had this to say:
The knowledge that we were coming up to our sixth birthday triggered lots of typical Teams calls amongst the staff here at Playtonic. Should we all don party hats and video chat together? Should we have a few mocktails, whip out the Karaoke and belt out our best Beyoncé? Or should we launch a new publishing label designed to bring the best games from indie studios the world over to market? Given I had a bit of scratchy throat that evening – and that the establishment of Playtonic Friends had been brewing as a serious ambition for a while – we went with that.
Steph Darrah, Business Development Manager at Playtonic, added:
While everyone at Playtonic has dreams of recreating Scrooge McDuck splashing around in his pool of cold, hard cash, in reality our motivation for setting up Playtonic Friends was to take what we’ve learned about producing & releasing video games and use it to aid developers of a like mind looking for a fruitful route to market. That said, a yacht moored on the shores of Monte Carlo would be nice.
The games to be published via Playtonic Friends will soon be revealed, but this doesn’t mean that Playtonic itself is stepping back from development; according to Price, the studio has more titles in development than ever before, and is working on a “top secret” game involving Capital B, the antagonist of the Yooka-Laylee series.