Take-Two Breaks Off Cooperation With People Can Fly
The two-year partnership between People Can Fly and Take-Two has come to an end. Importantly, Project Dagger is doing well, and the studio continues its development.
Polish studio People Can Fly has received a letter from publisher Take-Two Interactive, informing of its intention to terminate the contract covering a major project worth about €50 million. However, the termination will probably not thwart the plans of Polish developers.
Project Dagger is doing fine
Details can be found in the official report [in Polish]. It mentions primarily project "Dagger" - a high-budget game action RPG IP, which the studio has been working on since 2020 (under the management of a team in New York). The publisher of the game was to be Take-Two, and about 40-60 million euros were invested into the project. However, the report makes it clear that the publisher did not submit any contractually stipulated option to buy back the copyrights. As a result, the People Can Fly studio will retain the intellectual property rights as sole owner.
"I assume that we parted on partnership terms, and I see no reason why we should not return to cooperation with Take-Two Interactive in the future, on another project," wrote Sebastian Wojciechowski, CEO of People Can Fly.
The president of the Polish studio also shared his plans for the future of the game.
"We strongly believe in project Dagger and want to continue working on it as part of our self-publishing efforts. The game is still in pre-production - our team is currently focusing on fine-tuning of the combat and gameplay systems and migrating from UE4 to UE5."
The self-publishing model assumes the release of a game to the market without the involvement of a third-party publisher, probably only in digital form. Such a procedure is increasingly popular in the game industry, especially since publishers also have their sins. At the same time, the studio's president does not rule out establishing cooperation with another publisher, if the conditions are attractive business-wise. Planned release date of project Dagger is invariably 2024.
People Can Fly in good condition
Currently, the studio is working on 7 projects (in May we knew about five). Two new games will be developed with VR technology in mind, one of which is expected to be an adaptation of a game from the developer's portfolio. The company also announced plans to release one game a year starting in 2024.
PCF currently has more than 550 employees in branches spread across Poland, the US and Canada. The studio is growing - in May it had about 495 employees, compared to 281 a year ago.
The studio's latest game is Outriders, a TPP shooter with RPG elements released in April by Square Enix. The title has been quite well received (the average rating of reviewers is 73% on Metacritic), and recently received the Worldslayer DLC, which attracted players, but collected mixed reviews.
