A thing I learned from the latest Thor Highheels vid is that Wanted: Dead’s developer Soleil also made Valkyrie Elysium for Square Enix. After that, I learned they also made the third-person slash-em-up Samurai Jack game for Apple Arcade back in 2020. What a frankly wild repertoire.
(Vid here btw)
I feel like I felt when I learned that Harvestella was made by Live Wire Inc., the same dev team that made Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights and three shmup ports that people who love shmups really seem to love (Radiant Silvergun, Mushihimesama and Espgaluda II). We love to see AA dev, baby.
I think it does kind of suck how these studios don’t get recognized for their work as much as their publishers. Harvestella was a “Square Enix Presents” game. Wanted: Dead has been marketed as an exclusively Team NINJA game. It feels like a very specific kind of erasure to me.
The Soleil-developed Samurai Jack game? That was marketed as an “Adult Swim Games” title. Adult Swim Games is even listed as the developer on its Apple Arcade page. This happens all the time with mobile releases too.
I think it’s unequivocally good when developers are allowed to stand proudly behind their work, even if that work is contract or spec work. Like “hey we made this. Watch us make other cool shit too.”
There’s a practical reason for this as well. Namely: I think we all benefit from seeing the finer-grained connective tissue in the industry that undergirds big studios or publishers. Like look at this shit and tell me we all have a great understanding of how the sausage is made.
Three different Infinity Ward studios. Eight other Activision subsidiaries. One video game. “Dang I can’t imagine why it’s so hard to unionize the video game industry.”
I know some game devs who follow me do have that finer-grained understanding of the industry already and will probably be rolling their eyes to this post. But I don’t think the general public really gets it. We consume games with literally no concept of who makes them. It speaks to big issues of exploitation in this industry, issues like what People Make Games talked about back in March 2021 in their video “How Game Publishers Buy Crunch Overseas.”
I don’t really have a larger point to make here except that these are the thoughts I thought this morning and idk, maybe it’s nothing. Anyway,