STUDIO PROFILE

The Yooka-Laylee creator on becoming a friendlier kind of developer-publisher

By Chris Schilling

Gavin Price wants to make it clear that Playtonic the developer isn’t going anywhere. The studio has, in fact, some very grand plans, about which we’re sworn to secrecy – suffice it to say, it’s currently working on three games, though we won’t be seeing them for a while. In the meantime, Playtonic the publisher will be keeping itself busy: its new Playtonic Friends label has announced its first raft of games, and Price tells us there will be more to come.

In some ways, it’s a strange time to establish a new part of your business. How has COVID-19 affected Playtonic’s plans? “It’s hard to tell,” Price says. “You can’t reload your quicksave from before it happened and try playing it another way. But in some ways, I think it’s actually helped us. We always said, if we’re going to have [several projects] on the go, we want to have time to slow-cook them. So it’s actually been fine moving to working from home. It’d be horrible, I think, if we had to transition and we were under pressure to ship something pretty immediately. This is the nice phase of development.”

And on the publishing side of the business? “There’s been pros and cons. It must be hard to start a new role for the people who’ve joined us during the pandemic.” As things slowly start to move back to normality, Playtonic is recruiting for two more full-time in-house positions to help it expand, though Price says that side of the studio isn’t ever going to get too large: “We don’t want to become a publisher with a development studio. We’re a developer with a publishing arm. We’re not going to go and sign five more titles each year, then go from five [staff] to ten to 15 to 20. We will be able to stay small and nimble.”