For the last decade Quantic Dreams has worked exclusively with Sony to release titles for their PlayStation hardware. The partnership started with Heavy Rain, then Beyond: Two Souls and accumulated with their most successful title, Detroit: Become Human. Now the company is breaking out a bit, saying at the beginning of this year they wanted to go multiplatform, and now all three of the before mentioned games are coming to PC later this year. Seems their ambitions go beyond that, however, as the studio now wants to became a full blown third party publisher.
As reported by GamesBeat, the company has employed Sebastien Motte, former executive of Unity and Microsoft, to help helm their budding publishing division. With a new minority investment from Chinese company NetEase, they hope to sustain a new model and publish 1-2 titles a year.
“Quantic Dream has been an independent, triple-A developer for the past 22 years,” Motte said. “With the NetEase investment, we are fully independent again. We are able to self-fund future development on multiple projects. And more importantly, with better digital distribution channels, there is an opportunity to become more independent and self publish.”
Making a transition from developer to publisher is a rocky one and something that many companies have tripped up in attempting. It’ll be interesting to see how Quantic Dream manages it.