After having their most successful game to date, Detroit: Become Human, developer Quantic Dream seems to be ending their long exclusive working relationship with Sony that began all the way back in 2010 with the release of Heavy Rain. The company is looking to branch out, and it looks like they already have multiple things lined up.
In an interview with GameSpot, CEO of Quantic Dream and infamous Director David Cage spoke about the company’s future. While it’s been said in the past that Quantic Dream had planned to pursue third party publishing, Cage said they want to use their 22 years of experience to help others. He also confirms that the company has several projects in the works, in line with his ambitions for Quantic Dream to become a multi-franchise studio– though it’s not clear if he’s referring to projects they plan to publish or something they are developing.
“That’s really what motivated us initially to look around, and so we started talking to different people and very quickly we found that the people at NetEase–that is the fifth-largest publisher in the world, although they may be less famous than other publishers right now, but they’re pretty big,” said Cage. “But we met people that we really like and who understood what we were doing, understood our vision, and just wanted to help us to grow and to explore different possibilities. It gives us the same freedom, give us the support we needed for our new ambitions, but we want to be even more ambitious than we’ve ever been and just continue creating games that are different.
“We are working around on different projects, and that’s also something we wanted to do for a long time. Putting the same passion and the same enthusiasm and exploring maybe different jobs. An important part of what we wanted to do was to become a publisher to publish our own games, that was something important to us, but also to work with other developers, and not necessarily regarding interactive storytelling, but any genre. As long as it’s original, innovative, and high-quality, we are interested. And we have been in this industry for 22 years, so we just felt that maybe we could also share the experience we had being a developer ourselves for a long time, sharing access to motion capture, to soundstages, to actors, to talents, to outsourcing, all the industrial advantages that we may have. Technology also could be shared. And just give a chance to other developers to get access to this fantastic market and to gamers, and just help them the best we can.”
Many third party developers have tried their hand at publishing, but few of them tend to stay in the game for long, due to all the challenges and costs associated with such an endeavor. Whether Quantic Dream can do so or not is something only time will tell, but hopefully they can bring some interesting games, if nothing else.
