A new indie publisher is bursting onto the scene, to add to the array of places which can help deliver the kind of games you might find sites like ours covering as part of an event like Wishlisted, or just because we noticed they had a character in them that we we thought looked wacky in a way that’s just as newsworthy as a big exec saying a thing.
Anyway, this new label’s called Pantaloon, which is extending into publishing after its humble beginnings as a newsletter championing indie games that’re “bold & bizarre”.
The first couple of games it’s signed up are Sub-Verge, a “psychological narrative puzzle game” from developer Interactive Tragedy that’s out in May and Tributary Games’ cosmic horror solitare thing Occlude. Pantaloon’s also bringing its own game Puzzletrunk – currently available via Itch.io – to Steam later this year.
“The world probably doesn’t need another indie publisher,” Pantaloon founder Jamin Smith, formerly a brand manager at Square Enix and marketing director at Modern Wolf said. “But our vision is built off a different set of principles. With an existing awareness platform and terms that give novel agency and security to development partners, we seek to actively court risk, finding peculiar or experimental games that can chart unexplored or choppy genre-waters.
“‘A home for misfits’ is more than just a tagline; it’s a call to arms for games that don’t fit traditional publishing structures.”
The part of that which has caught my eye, given the not small list of problems both the indie and triple-A spaces of the games industry are grappling with today, is the desire to welcome the idea of taking on game with concepts that come with some risk – as the likes of mega-success Baldur’s Gate 3 did.
The big corporate cheeses out there are rightly regularly lambasted for refusing to take risks with their companies’ outputs, leading to a lot of iteration on established properties over new IP and blind chasing of trends that often ends up not going that well, especially for devs.
The indie space, meanwhile, with more pressure on devs than ever before in terms of discoverability and the need to just make enough bank to keep your studio afloat in the current financial climate, isn’t without its own factors that can prevent or dissuade developers from taking a risk to create something unique that could fill a player desire that’s currently untapped.
We’ll have to see if Pantaloon can help the games it signs up to break through and have the chance to do well out of their risk-taking, but it seems a mission worth undertaking.