Rebel alliance
Kepler Interactive is making some big promises. Coming from the people who brought us the Kowloon Nights fund, and backed to the tune of $120m by Chinese tech firm NetEase, it’s claiming to have constructed a new model for independent game development: a major publisher co‐owned and run by (currently) seven developers – A44, Alpha Channel, Awaceb, Ebb Software, Shapefarm, Sloclap and Timberline Studio. At a time when self-publishing is on the rise, alongside a surge in indie developerpublishers, it feels that the model’s benefits need some unpicking. It turns out that we needn’t have looked any further than Kepler’s reveal trailer.
“The seven studiosare all usingUnreal. It’s not an accident . We’retrying to make lifea little bit easier”
Not so much its contents – though it’s a stylish intro to its studios’ games – but rather how it was made. “It was really like a symphony of workingtogether,” Kepler CEO Alexis Garavaryan says.The montage was put together by a video specialist at Paris’s Sloclap,edited to music composedby Thomas Lilja of Tokyo’s Shapefarm. “It really felt like this community coming together to put this thing out,” Garavaryan says. “We just were like, ‘Wow, this is really the kind of thing we can do if we combine forces and work together’.”