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UK independent studio Relentless will step away from the retail games market and has ended its exclusivity agreement with Sony, the group’s co-founder has said.
The Brighton-based studio, founded in 2003, based its trade on the successful Buzz retail games for PlayStation devices.
Yet its co-founder Andrew Eades believes the future of the retail industry is increasingly becoming too selective, and finds more opportunity in the growing digital market.
Eades told GamesIndustry.biz that the retail games sector “is becoming very much about pillar titles for a hardcore audience”.
"If I compare Call of Duty to a Buzz game, we don’t have the kind of multi-million marketing push and development budgets that Call of Duty clearly has,” he said, adding he was nevertheless very proud of Buzz’s production values.
“We have to find a new way to get to our audience, and that is digital, episodic, various different platforms,” he added.
Part of Relentless’ new plan is to expand its work to other platforms beyond PlayStation. It recently released its puzzle adventure title, Blue Toad Murder Files, onto PC via the Steam platform. The game was initially a PlayStation Network exclusive.
Yet Eades, whose studio has vast experience with Sony’s game platforms, naturally considers the PlayStation to be its “main platform”.
"Our real strategy going forward is to change the company from a disc-based, console games company only,” he said.
"We wanted to change the company to have much more breadth and embrace the new digital platforms we saw coming in.”
Eades discusses elsewhere in his interview the benefits of digital platforms, and how the studio’s development remit has adjusted to them.
[Image: Jon Jordan]
