Mastertronic Starts 'Great Indie Games' Label
UK publisher Mastertronic, who you may know as the owners of the Sold Out software range, have launched a new publishing label called 'Great Indie Games'.
Designed specifically to bring indie titles to a games store near you, Mastertronic's Andy Payne explained that they want to try to give the best indie games a wider retail audience. He explained:
“We have always wanted to work more closely with developers and we believe we can add real value to indie games by getting them in front of a mainstream retail audience and shouting from the rooftops about the fruits of their considerable labour.“With the many and varied PC games offerings out there, casual or otherwise, there is a place for great games that have been produced on a lower budget than normal by small development teams. Every other creative art has indies, indeed the games industry grew out of indie pioneers, so it is about time we helped them get back to where they belong."
He added that Mastertronic are "on the look out for more indie developed games" and that any developers who are looking to get their games sold at retail should get in touch with them. For any developers interested, please note that the service is aimed at the UK, Ireland, Australia and the Nordic region with no word on any North American releases yet.
World of Goo has been confirmed as the first game to kickstart their campaign and will be released early July for £14.99.
Comments
Cool. I'll probably still buy through a digital distribution service (I <3 Steam), but whatever gets great games out to a wider audience!
Posted by: Chetyre | June 18, 2009 4:07 AM
Erm...remind me not to use "less than" signs in a post again :P Anyway, I buy most of my games through Steam these days, but whatever gets good games out to a wider audience is fine by me!
Posted by: Chetyre | June 18, 2009 4:09 AM
You can use less than symbols actually, just need to type "& lt;" (without the space) instead of the usual sign.
Posted by: Tim | June 18, 2009 4:28 AM
Bringing indie games to retail? Ehhh.. i'm not 100% sure it'll be successful. But who knows, it might actually work.
Posted by: Gio | June 18, 2009 6:14 AM
Back in the old days, most of the games you'd find in the computer store would:
A) Be on floppies in a zip-lock sandwich bag with a typewritten or dotmatrix printed instruction sheet.
and
B) Be a ripped off shareware or freeware game.
Basically, indies used to be the majority market. Now that distribution is easier, and the demographic of game buyers is much, much larger, why couldn't indies make a resurgence?
Posted by: failrate | June 18, 2009 7:45 AM
Like if World Of Goo ever needed of more advertising...
Posted by: Shadow | June 18, 2009 8:32 AM
Great, where do I sign up!
I remember owning loads of mastertronic games back in the day.
Posted by: X-0ut | June 18, 2009 10:06 AM
"For any developers interested, please note that the service is aimed at the UK, Ireland, Australia and the Nordic region with no word on any North American releases yet."
?
What about other European countries, like in the Mediterranean area?
That seems strange as I live in Portugal and can see Sold Out games in almost every game store.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 18, 2009 10:40 AM
Good news overall, but I though RTL Playtainment was publishing World of Goo in European retail shops this month? Did the game suddenly get two publishing deals for the same territory?
Posted by: fluffy bunny | June 18, 2009 10:45 AM
Sounds like a good idea. I wonder though how they plan to balance casual (think overdone match-3) versus creative, out-of-the-box games like World of Goo.
If it ends up like Great Games Experience it'll be one in a million.
Posted by: Endurion | June 18, 2009 12:29 PM
This looks like an awsome news for indie developpers.
"Like if World Of Goo ever needed of more advertising..."
I think World of Goo is actually advertising the website :P
Posted by: Max | June 19, 2009 12:09 AM
After taking a look around the homepage I could not find any info on contacting mastertronic about this.
There is a forum post, but its over a year old :/
Posted by: X-0ut | June 19, 2009 7:38 AM
Mastertronic started just like that (like many UK game companies of the early 80s), by bundling cheap (crap?) software on cassette and selling it.
So they are just coming back to their first business model. I hope it will be a bit more high quality this time, and that we won't hear again stories of devellopers being cheated like in the good old days of C64/spectrum
Posted by: iom | June 19, 2009 6:12 PM