Play Greenhouse - new indie game publisher

Written by Ben on April 7th, 2008 and posted in Game News
Tags : development, Indie, interview

Penny Arcade have decided that “publishers are scum” (paraphrasing there) so they are going to start their own indie publishing business called Greenhouse.

Many indie game devs have tried this, self publishing is a common path, however to really succeed with this sort of thing you need to have lots of people viewing your website, and this is the advantage that Penny Arcade bring to the table. As well as publishing their own upcoming game, they want to publish games by small developers. They’re mostly interested in quirky or arty games that are clearly good, but don’t fall into the types of genres the mainstream audience would be attracted too (one game they mentioned is my favorite Crayon Physics).

Wired have done an interview with Gabe and Tycho asking all the questions I am sure you want to know - but to skip to the good bits… I particularly like this quote

We had a meeting with GameStop to talk about selling a boxed version of the game. Once we had a bunch of episodes together, we would collect them and put them in a box, you know? And GameStop said, oh, that’s fantastic. We’d love to do it, we’d love to carry the game… but it’s not going to be available anywhere else, is it?

And Robert said, well, we’re going to digitally distribute it first.

They got really upset. And they said, no, you can’t do that. We can’t have it in our store if it’s coming out digitally first. And he said, well, I’m sorry, that’s the way it works. We’re publishing our game and we can say where it goes. And so the deal that they tried to strike with Robert was okay, well, listen: If you cut us in on the profits from online distribution, and XBLA, and everything it comes out on, then we’ll think about carrying it in the store. Just, what assholes.

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