The Worm Has Turned…

Now in its 20th year, Worms developer Team17 is about to turn its back on third-party publishers and pursue a future of self-published, 100 per cent digital projects. Studio director Martyn Brown explains the unexpected decision…

2009 is the year in which Team17 moves from traditional game developer to a digital-only self-publishing business model. How long have you been preparing for the switch and what prompted the change?
It began around late-2005 when it became pretty apparent that there would be opportunities online. It all crystallised when we saw Live Arcade for the first time. We switched the 360 on and just thought ‘wow, this is the way to go’. At the time, we’d been wavering on whether to do Worms for Live Arcade since Microsoft had been chasing us about it. It was one of those things where the platform holder was saying, ‘oh we have the next big thing’. And we’ve heard so much shit over the years that it becomes difficult to be believe, but when we saw it we were really wowed. From that date it was a case of asking ‘what can we do [with this technology]?’ Obviously, we were the first European studio on PSN as well; we did Lemmings, which was a launch title in all territories. So we got used to doing digital console titles very quickly and after spending six years self-publishing in the early-Nineties, when Team17 first started, it felt like we could do that again. We’d also had a bit of a rollercoaster ride with various third-party publishers. It was hard to find a long-term partner that we could relax with. Developers and publishers are very different beasts and it was sometimes like a power struggle. Once you’ve done your own thing then moved on to that sort of relationship, it’s a difficult position to be in. We’d actually tried for five years to get a new Alien Breed signed up with various third-party publishers and there was interest here and there and we’d built such a compelling case for what we wanted to produce that I couldn’t believe that it never got signed. We were very close to a couple of major deals with very big platform holders, but for one reason or another it just didn’t work out. So the thought of not having to go through all the retail pitching, greenlight process, and all the rest of it felt too good to be true.

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