A new game video game publisher Untold Tales formed by Techland veterans and specialists has announced its creation today. Untold Tales has been formed under the focus that it will focus on single-player games that have the ability to tell an intriguing story to be that through the gameplay or the game itself. The publisher has also set itself up to focus on only releasing a select number of titles every year that match this criterion and only for platforms that fit each title.
Maciej Łączny, CEO at Untold Stories said:
Being selective and only focusing on 1 or 2 games at a time ensures our devs are taken care of both during and after production and not feel like they’re just another name among 10 others we’re juggling. We also want them to feel they’re allowed to focus on putting their game out where they are wanted. Times have changed significantly in how best to put a game out and that also means some platforms are better than others for certain games. It just doesn’t make sense to force devs to be everywhere to try to maximize exposure.
Former Techland producer and Head of Operations Maciej Łączny will be heading up a team made up of experienced specialists in production, QA, bizdev, marketing, and PR. Pawel Skaba, VP, Head of Marketing comments:
As of now there’s around 10 of us in total. We all left Techland at various points in our careers to join other teams and endeavours, but mainly it was to build up experience and knowhow outside the AAA echo chamber. We’ve now been part of multiple game launches, worked with devs from all over the world and ridden the waves of changes that keeps proving there needs to be more agile publishers who treat devs like partners and not manufacturers.
We know there are already a handful of publishers out there who do good by their devs and players, but it feels like there are still so few of them. We’ve all seen the slew of publishing horror stories out there and a lot of devs have themselves been a part of these broken partnerships. We want to be one of the rare teams that show the gaming world you can do this all differently and approach both devs and players with total fairness and respect. Maciej, Grzegorz, and I have known each other for a really long time. We’ve been through many situations and seen so many fair and unfair publishing partnerships so we firmly believe that with our experience and approach we can show that it can all work differently, better.
Untold Tales details that their focus will be to be a publisher who wants to ‘cut the crap’ for both the publisher and the players alike. Their approach will be fair and custom to each game while it being data and community focuses to ensure time, resources, and efforts are spent on things that actually matter to both parties. Grzegorz Drabik, VP, Head of Business Development further details:
Devs need to understand we don’t want the rights to your IP. We don’t want revenue shares where you end up screwed. And we’ll never expect you to release something that isn’t ready and just wrecks your studio’s reputation. Rather we’re going to have very open and transparent agreements, where a lot of our decisions will be based on data and community feedback and not some spray and pray mentality.
As for players, expect honest conversations, clear responses, and no ludicrous 3 tiered pre-order campaigns with paid DLC waiting in the wings for a month later. We’ll ensure our games are supported post-release as best as possible, be it with free updates or with bigger content if the dev team is onboard. It’s going to be a very clear ‘What you bought is what was the full game’ approach here from the start.
Check out the publisher announcement reel below:
For their first publishing projects, the publisher has revealed the Nintendo Switch ports of The Hong Kong Massacre and Desolation. The Hong Kong Massacre is a stylish slow-motion manipulation top-down shooter by the Swedish developer VRESKI whereas Beautiful Desolation is an isometric adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic Africa by the South African developer The Brotherhood. Beautiful Desolation will also release on PS4. A third unannounced PC and console title will be revealed at a later stage.
For more details about the new publisher and their upcoming projects, you can check out their official website.
