Voici un nouveau projet qui pourrait intéresser les créateurs et studios indépendants à la recherche de soutien pour développer leurs titres. Slitherine vient en effet de dévoiler aujourd’hui un programme d’accompagnement pour financer et publier de tels jeux de stratégie. Les wargames ou équivalents ne demandant qu’à être adaptés, correctement, sur un écran étant légion.
Voilà donc une option qui à terme, d’ici quelques années, pourrait s’avérer utile pour permettre à des titres originaux de voir le jour, dans un marché en continuelle expansion, dans lequel il est donc plus difficile en un sens d’émerger. Sans même parler des difficultés inhérentes à la création de tout jeu vidéo.
Nommé K-Project, cette initiative compte pour le moment trois jeux en cours, dont Tactical Troops – Anthracite Shift, dévoilé il y a quelques semaines. Les deux autres titres n’ayant pas encore été annoncés.
Pour plus d’informations sur K-Project, voyez cette page chez Slitherine. A lire en plus du communiqué suivant cet entretien sur Gamesindustry.biz, où Marco Minoli, directeur marketing, explique un peu plus la démarche proposée.
Communiqué
8th May 2020 – Slitherine LTD is proud to announce the launch of its special program to find, fund and publish indie strategy games: K–Project.
Good ideas and great innovation are not enough to be successful in 2020’s videogame market. The reality is that no matter how much a game shines, it will be just one of the ten thousand games published each year on digital platforms like Steam, Epic, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo e-shops. With 25 games published each day on Steam on average, chances are that most indie games will never be seen by the gamers who would love them the most.
With more than 100 staff in their offices in London, Milan, Canada, the US, Bulgaria, and France, Slitherine is a well-established publisher, having collaborated to publish games with Sony Pictures, Games Workshop and Universal. Publishing new content almost every week, they have a catalogue of dozens of wargames and strategy titles, each with numerous DLCs.
But it wasn’t always like that. In 2000, Slitherine was an indie developer. Just three people in a room, and one game they were trying to get in front of players.
“We will never forget we started with a team of three people in a room with our first game, Legion. We love indie games and we believe K-Project can give a solid chance to any promising indie developer with a passion for strategy games,” says Marco A. Minoli, Marketing Director of Slitherine.
Back when Slitherine was first starting out, finding a publisher was the most difficult task for an indie dev team. Now, it’s even harder, with developers having to invest time and money on a demo, exhibiting at shows from US to Germany, looking for a 15-minute meeting in a crowded hall. 2020 brings new challenges, with all games shows being cancelled due to the spread of coronavirus.
For this reason, Slitherine created K- Project.
What is K-Project? An organic, ongoing programme of activities to allow indie developers to show their games to a broader audience, with a direct pitch channel accessible to any dev team. “Last year, we saw more than 9,000 games debuting on Steam alone. K-Project is our way to help indie strategy games to be seen; our act of love to remember where we started and help others with the same dream,” says Marco Minoli, Marketing Director of Slitherine.
Find the K-Project page Slitherine’s new site, where developers can connect directly to Slitherine management and pitch their projects. “We expect something moving, like a vertical slice, a demo, or even a video. We are not going to look at presentations or design documents only. We want to help games already in action,” says Marco Minoli. A shortlist of submission rules can be found here.
“We’re not taking anything from them, we’re just helping them put the game on the market. That’s actually one thing that’s valid for all our contracts. We never ever, ever signed a game where we own the IP as a publisher. We’ve been a developer and we know what it’s like,” said Marco Minoli in a interview with Gamesindustry.biz earlier this week.
Slitherine is going to invest 5% of all Slitherine’s indie game earnings into K-Project, with a starting sum of $100,000 already in the fund. This fund will be used to improve, boost, and publish the games our committee will choose in the next months.
“Right now, we already have three games in the K-Project pipeline. The first is the already announced Tactical Troops – Anthracite Shift, a sci-fi turn-based team tactical wargame. We thought QED Games, the developer working on Tactical Troops, had some really clever ideas that, in our opinion, will give a fresh touch to the old school Laser Squad genre, and this is the reason we chose this game as the first to be published under K-Project.”
Two more unannounced indie games are also in development.
Slitherine is the world’s leading producer and publisher of digital wargames and strategy games.
Under the Slitherine (www.slitherine.com) and Matrix Games (www.matrixgames.com) brands it has published literally hundreds of games, with many award-winning titles in its portfolio and spanning all digital platforms, from home consoles to modern smartphones and tablets.
Slitherine is also involved with book publishing, board gaming and works with a wide array of key licensing partners, such as HISTORY®, MILITARY HISTORY®, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Games Workshop, BBC, Osprey, Scholastic, Buzz Aldrin Enterprises and many others to deliver the best blend of historical accuracy in an exciting and entertaining way.
With subsidiaries in the UK, US, Canada, France, Italy and Romania Slitherine is the world’s largest organization specializing in this important and vibrant niche. The group’s mission over the coming years is to lead the way in innovation and growth in an ever-expanding segment of the entertainment industry.
