Key Takeaways
- Owlcat is becoming a publisher for indie games to help new studios bring their visions to life.
- Owlcat is using its self-publishing experience on games like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to guide its publishing efforts.
- Owlcat’s publishing journey is starting with Emotion Spark Studios and Another Angle Games, with the company striving to mentor and guide them.
The recent announcement that Owlcat, developers of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, would publish a pair of indie games–Rue Valley and Shadow of the Road–shouldn’t come as a surprise to fans of the beloved RPG developer. The studio characterized the decision as a logical next step after self-publishing a few titles.
Game Rant spoke to Owlcat’s Head of Publishing Andrey Tsvetkov about taking the next step in the Cyprus-based studio’s journey as part of the gaming industry, and why it’s well-suited to its new role as a publisher of indies. In fact, that role is less new than it appears.
The Quest to Become a Publisher
The RPG developer has a surprisingly long history interwoven with another new publishing label, Knights Peak. But for its recent games, like Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, Owlcat has done its own work in the publishing space, and that’s helped the team see new experiences in the industry that broadened its horizons. Tsvetkov explained how Owlcat wants to help studios that were like it was nearly a decade ago, getting its start.
We were building a marketing unit within Owlcat Games. It was when our second title,
Wrath of the Righteous
, was in pre-production and we started thinking of how we would like to build up the promotional campaign for it. One of the first things that we wanted to do was to create a Kickstarter campaign for that. This is basically the first step to the self-publishing idea and then to the idea to become a publisher and help other studios to bring their creations to life.
Now, Owlcat wants to use that experience and its expertise with narrative games to help indie developers bring their vision to the public. It’s starting with two studios: Emotion Spark Studios from Serbia and Another Angle Games from Poland. Tsvetkov doesn’t think of Owlcat as choosing games to publish, so much as studios to work with. For him, Emotion Spark and Another Angle didn’t just have good pitches and demos, but the right stuff as a team.
Another Angle’s title, Shadow of the Road, is a character-driven story about samurai in a magic steampunk feudal Japan, though the fascinating setting wasn’t even part of the game when Owlcat picked up the title. Meanwhile, Rue Valley is Emotion Spark’s title, which Tsvetkov said at its core is about struggling with mental health issues and depression, is something that hit close to home for him. The game tells its story in a rich and satisfying way reminiscent of Disco Elysium.
But Owlcat wants to do more for Rue Valley and Shadow of the Road than just marketing and working with platforms. In a way, Owlcat hopes to act as a mentor for the indie studios it partners with, Tsvetkov explained.
We have three games developed and published already, and we’re aiming at this specific market. We know this market quite well. We think that we can give some advice here to the developers. “Hey, you should take a specific look at this specific thing, just because the player will pay additional attention to it. So let’s just focus on it and make sure that this specific thing would be exceeding the expectations.” This is the expertise that we’re sharing here at various moments of gameplay … So this is the kind of advice that we are providing to the teams, and I hope this information helps them to push certain aspects of the game further.
That said, Tsvetkov stressed that they Owlcat is an indie publisher, and won’t overstep those bounds. Owlcat has no interest in being a co-developer on these titles, preferring to let the strong vision of the studios it partners with be unfettered. It also seeks out studios that can stand on their own, with the ability to deliver on their ambitions. Owlcat’s role would be as more of a guide or helpful friend who knows the path of development for indie narrative games.
Breaking New Ground as a Publisher Already
With Rue Valley, Owlcat put its expertise in the RPG and narrative-driven games space to work with a novel approach to public testing. Rather than being available on a traditional platform for early access like Steam, Rue Valley’s beta is available to Humble Choice subscribers.
While Tsvetkov wasn’t sure, it seems that Rue Valley is one of the first games to offer early access specifically through Humble Choice. Humble announced the program in mid-2024, and already Owlcat has partnered with the service for it. Tsvetkov explained the reasoning behind choosing Humble Choice as the platform for early access:
We have a really close relationship with Humble. We worked for quite a while with them and our titles–
Wrath of the Righteous
in particular
–were part of Humble Choice. We did bundles together, and we appreciate how Humble Bundle built a player base for this type of game. We talked to Humble and tried to find out how we could push this product to people. But we didn’t want to do what we were not ready to do, and so we talked to Humble and they said “Okay, well, let’s do it together. We can bring you the people who would appreciate this kind of product that will provide the relevant feedback that we need to help you shape it further.”
The relationship between Owlcat and Humble gave Rue Valley access to an audience who is especially interested in the style of game that Emotion Spark is developing, letting it get feedback from its intended fan base instead of casting a wide net and getting reviews less specific to its audience’s needs, Tsvetkov explained.
A Source of Publishing Experience
Though Owlcat has experience from its history of self-publishing, that’s not the only expertise it has in the publishing space, said Tsvetkov, which certainly gives it a leg up in its efforts at releasing narrative-driven titles. That’s because of a publishing label that’s not often associated with Owlcat, but is operated by them: Meta Publishing.
This is a publishing label that has been running for quite some time. They have a selection of products that are already out there in the market, and they helped us to publish
Wrath of the Righteous
. We are a single team, but this is just a label that we maintain and that helps us to distance ourselves from the line of products that traditionally might be associated with all kinds of games rather than RPG experiences. And these titles are quite different–really
we like indie games
, and we like new ideas. So for this specific label, we are publishing titles that are not narrative or RPG focused, but also bring interesting gameplay ideas to the world.
Meta has published games like sci-fi post-apocalyptic mystery The Uncertain: Light at the End, the tiny robot action-adventure Biped and its co-op evolution Biped 2, and the dark and brutal medieval survival title Nested Lands. Nested Lands and Biped 2 are actively worked on by the team at Owlcat under this label as of reporting.
Innovation and invention are key to Owlcat’s philosophy–beyond just working with Humble or its publishing approach as a whole, Owlcat believes that new ideas are critical to alleviating burnout among industry employees. As such, it continues to seek out new ideas, both as Owlcat and as Meta Publishing. In fact, the team has a stack of pitches from Gamescom in August that it is currently reviewing, which could lead to even more interesting story-driven indies published by Owlcat.