Landfall has been making games for over 10 years now. Recent ventures include the co-op climbing sim Peak and the multiplayer horror game Content Warning, both of which I absolutely loved. But now Landfall is preparing for its next step: publishing games.
“We made a publisher to only publish our own games,” Landfall announced on social media. “We called it evil because spreadsheets and contracts are evil and some evil people have got to do it.” Yeah, that checks out.
Technically, Evil Landfall was actually established three years ago, which the CEO of Evil Landfall Kirsten-Lee Naidoo explains in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Although all it’s been doing for the last few years is publishing Landfall’s own games, which is why a big announcement hasn’t been made prior to this point, they didn’t see any reason for it.
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But now Evil Landfall is opening up a bit, they’ll also be offering help to other indie devs: “Evil Landfall also does project-based investments to support other indie game studios. We don’t publish their games but we can help them with money and advice.”
We’ve been seeing this trend of successful indie studios giving back by opening publishing arms to help other indie devs quite a lot recently. Another example that immediately comes to mind is Pocketpair’s new publisher Pocketpair Publishing which opened up early last year with the aim of helping indie games in what is now a tricky and somewhat chaotic market.
Publishing manager John Buckley reported getting over 1,500 LinkedIn requests within just 24 hours of the announcement, proving that there’s clearly a need for this kind of indie intervention.
Evil Landfall doesn’t go quite as far as Pocketpair Publishing as the help is limited to advice and money for other indie devs right now, but Naidoo sees no reason it should always stay that way: “I think if projects come by that are interesting, that we think, ‘Oh, maybe we should publish this game, maybe it does make sense’, then we would do it. There hasn’t quite yet been an opportunity, but I think part of us becoming a more known company is opening up doors like that.”
I’m very excited to see how this next stage pans out for Landfall. They don’t just have a fantastic recent catalogue of games, but with others like Stick Fight: The Game and Totally Accurate Battlegrounds in their dev history I’d be really interested to see what other games from different devs come out of this new venture.
But for now Naidoo is just keeping things clean and simple, as to not get ahead of themselves: “If you want to self-publish your games and you want Landfall’s support in terms of funding and advice, talk to Evil Landfall. If you want Evil Landfall to publish a game, that might not happen, but we’re interested to hear more.”