Owlcat Games is expanding beyond game development by stepping into a publishing field. The studio, known for its RPGs based on the Pathfinder IP, will help other teams working on projects in the genre.
Rue Valley (right), Shadow of the Road (left)
In addition to developing its own games, Owlcat will now also provide various publishing services to partner studios and ensure they have all the funding and other resources needed to create and ship projects.
“We would like to work with teams that share our passion for telling captivating stories through narrative-driven games,” Owlcat head of publishing Andrey Tsvetkov said in a statement. “These might not fall entirely into the RPG genre, but they will definitely have a solid focus on story, characters, and worldbuilding.”
The company has already signed deals with two studios:
- Emotion Spark Studio — Serbia-based developer currently working on Rue Valley, a story-driven adventure RPG in the style of Disco Elysium;
- Another Angle Games — Polish team developing Shadow of the Road, a turn-based tactical RPG set in feudal Japan.
Owlcat also gained full control over META Publishing, a publishing label that helped bring Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to the market. The company, whose portfolio includes games like Train Valley and Biped, will follow its own strategy and focus on projects with co-op multiplayer features.
Earlier this month, Owlcat revealed that it is now working on four games. All of them are based on the existing franchises, but not IPs like Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, or World of Darkness. The studio will continue to make classic RPGs, while also making a higher-budget and more ambitious game built with Unreal Engine 5.
With its expansion into publishing, it can be assumed that Owlcat is doing well financially. After releasing the commercially successful Pathfinder series, the studio launched Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader last year. The game received positive reviews and sold over 500k copies in its first month.