Devolver Digital today revealed Big Fan Games, its new publishing label and wholly owned subsidiary. Big Fan Games is a small team focused on indie creators — specifically, on indie creators who are interested in making games licensed from existing franchises. The new studio’s team has several members from Good Shepherd Entertainment, and its mandate appears to focus on the promise of what indie-game creativity can bring to licensed titles.
Big Fan would support indie developers who wish to make an unusual game within a certain franchise, as well as IP owners who wish to find a new avenue to connect with fans. As the company said in an official statement, “When it comes to ‘licensed games,’ we think there’s room for a new approach. One where indie developers get to make the call. To take some risks and explore unique ideas that aren’t dictated by spreadsheets.”
Big Fan cites examples of creative IP from indie studios with other Devolver-based projects: Bithell Games’ John Wick Hex, or Upstream Arcade’s Hellboy: Web of Wyrd or Nerial’s Reigns: Game of Thrones. As the company states: “We support developers by providing our industry expertise and the resources they
need to bring their ideas to life. Our goal at Big Fan is to nurture fun and inventive games that stand on their own, rather than serving as marketing tie-ins for other media launches.”
Games made by fans for fans
GamesBeat spoke with Amanda Kruse and Lincoln Hershberger, Big Fan’s head of business development and general manager respectively, about what’s behind the new label. Herschberger described Big Fan’s new approach to licensed IP, saying, “The genesis came from Devolver’s developers, who interested in exploring and working with licensed IP, but they didn’t know where to start, or if that was even feasible — so that’s where that started to come about… Working with licensers is not as hard and difficult as you think, and if they find the right partner who has the right mindset, that can be a great relationship and a great partnership that adds a lot to it. That’s where we’re focused is finding those partners and those developers who have that shared passion.”
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Kruse said, “I don’t know that a lot of people who are creating licensed games are saying, ‘Yeah, let’s go for that really, really weird left of center person.’ And I think that’s kind of the where the Devolver piece comes in, because Devolver doesn’t do anything that’s not a little bit left of center from the jump. They’re they’re pushing us to go weirder.”
Kruse added that most ideas come from developer passion rather than IP owner request. “When you run something like a traditional RFP [request for proposal] process, and it’s a bake-off across multiple devs for one IP — I think the process is inherently broken, because it makes it an assignment, not a passion project, from the start. There’s so much that’s so hard about game making, and there’s so much that is definitively going to go wrong on every project. If they’re not beating the drum harder than anyone, I think that’s already doomed.”
Big Fan is currently working on several projects, according to Herschberger, with plans to announce something later this year.
