Playdead, the developers of the melancholy platformer Limbo, have successfully paid off all initial investors. Effectively buying back its own independence, the studio managed all of its payments with the aid of the investment banking consulting firm GP Bullhound.
“We are really happy about how it turned out even though the cost was higher than we had hoped,” CEO Dino Patti told Edge. “The process was very educational and this is a big step on our way to become fully independent.”
Limbo was originally self-funded in its early stages (in addition to grants from the Danish government), but the game’s expansion later in development required additional funding from outside investors.
“We’re aiming to be even more independent than we were before, and that’s expensive. What I’m hinting at, really, is that we’re investor-backed. So in that sense we’re trying to become more independent,” Patti told GI.biz. “In that sense…people who pay for the projects are the ones controlling it. We’re really aiming to use our own money, we’re our best investors. We’re the ones who know what we want. We want to control micro-decisions. We’ll probably want to sanity check them with people but we want to have control.”
(via IndustryGamers)