Thatgamecompany, the studio behind Flow, Flower, Journey and Sky: Children of the Light, has launched a publishing arm. Thatgamepublisher is starting life as a full-service label, offering funding, production planning, platform and launch strategy, marketing, community management and long-term IP development, the company told GamesIndustry.biz.
Co-founder Jenova Chen framed the move as the standard route for an indie studio that suddenly finds itself with money.
This is a very common pattern because number one, successful indie games usually are on a shoestring, and if the game becomes very successful, suddenly you have an overflow of cash.
A small team does not want to become “a thousands of people company,” Chen said, which leaves investing in other indie games as “a natural choice.” Thatgamecompany was nowhere near that position in 2012: Chen told GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year that making Journey almost bankrupted the studio and led to “everyone” being laid off. Sky: Children of the Light, released in 2019, changed the maths, and the studio is now routing its profits into what it describes as “emotionally ambitious games.”
Chen argued that the distribution balance has also shifted since Journey. Where the network was once owned by companies like PlayStation, “today, the distribution network is owned by the players, who are influencers,” he said, adding that a successful indie title with millions of players has “more influence for distribution than GameSpot, than IGN, than Steam.” He said roughly 70% of Sky's players are female, which he believes gives the label an audience overlap few publishers can match, including “many of our players who have never played games before.”
SJ Xue, head of corporate development at Thatgamecompany and the lead on the publishing initiative, said the label is hunting for games that “move people through play.”
The typical genre or platform restrictions would not apply to us. We are open to teams of any size, projects at any stage, and ideas still being prototyped. What matters is not the label, genre, scale, or format, but whether the game reaches for meaningful emotional territory and uses interactivity to take players there.
That brief is deliberately loose. “'Emotional' can mean many things,” Xue said. “It can be joyful, chaotic, even funny. The through line is always, will this stay with someone after the screen goes dark?”
Where indie labels such as Innersloth's Outersloth and Landfall's Evil Landfall have adopted funding-only models, Thatgamepublisher is going the other way, and it is willing to go past the sub-$1 million budgets that dominate indie funding. “We are open to working with everyone from solo developers with immense creativity to larger teams with AA-level budgets,” Xue said. Deal terms, including recoup percentages, will vary by project, and the label can work in “more modular arrangements” covering funding or marketing alone — though Xue said emotionally ambitious projects usually benefit from an integrated partnership.
The pitch to developers leans on the studio's own live-service record: Sky: Children of the Light has passed 300 million downloads across seven years of global operations. Chen said Thatgamepublisher has already signed a “couple” of games, which the company is not revealing yet.