“We’re a portfolio company,” says Pattison
emphatically. “We want to be able to deliver games - both internally and by supporting indies - to a wide range of different types of audiences across a wide range of platforms. So by acquiring the Hell Let Loose IP and building a virtual studio, it doesn’t change our ambition around a well balanced portfolio, and supporting lots of different audience types coming from our thirds and also internally.
IP this January, Team17 duplicated similar moves a year previous to buy up Golf With Your Friends, which had been developed by Blacklight Interactive. Together with the success of the homegrown Escapist games, it continues an apparent trend to not just get away from being entirely synonymous with the Worms franchise (which Team17 arguably has been for most of its existence), but to do so by increasing the number and variety of it’s properties it controls, perhaps so that games journalists don’t roll their eyes everytime a new Worms game is announced, or Team17 roll theirs when asked why another in the franchise hasn’t been.
VIRTUAL SANITY
Team17 isn’t just committed to one form of virtuality with its Hell Let Loose virtual studio, it’s also fully backing virtual reality for the first time, having recently announced the internally developed Killer Frequency for Meta Quest and Steam. Given that VR
has been established for six or seven years, why has it taken Team17 so long to embrace the technology? “I can’t answer the question as to why it’s taking so long because I haven’t been long enough at the company,” says Pattison, who, coming from PlaySation, brings with him a vast amount of experience working with PSVR and knowledge of its successor. “I know there was a lot of excitement, both in PlayStation VR, but also with what was going on with Oculus. And we’ve seen the huge success with Quest and Quest 2. But a lot of it is just about teams being freed up and having spare capacity to do some R&D and some exploration around VR, and it felt like Killer Frequency was an excellent way to explore that. So yeah, apologies if we’re late to the table, but we got there in the end. We’re very excited about what’s to come with VR.”
“When we speak to indie developers, we know what they’re going through. We know because we’ve been on that journey. We continue to be on that journey” Michael Pattison, CEO at Team17
“I mean, we’re working actively on Golf With Friends
- internally developed. We’re working actively on things to do with Worms - that’s not going away. We are in plans about what we’ll do with The Escapists in the future, because that’s something that we know is exciting for everyone. And we will seek to add more. We just announced Killer Frequency, which is a new IP in VR - that’s come from our internal studios. So there’s a balancing act there. We like the fact that we are actively involved as a developer, as well as a publisher, because when we speak to indie developers, we know what they’re going through. We know because we’ve been on that journey. We continue to be on that journey. We can provide them with any amount of extra development support to realise their vision. And when they come to us with their concepts, or vertical slices, or demos, we can identify where we can help, both from a development perspective and also publishing.”
TOKEN EFFORT Not to keep harping on about Worms, but the last announcement that Team17 made regarding the franchise was “generative art project” Metaworms, the abortive plan to sell procedurally generated Worms- related images as NFTs via the blockchain. It backfired rather grimly: Not only were Team17’s development partners not briefed, which resulted in some hostile criticisms from them, staff were plunged into a social media firestorm they were wholly unprepared or motivated to fight.
22 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
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