DotEmu founders launch new publisher Playdigious

DotEmu founders Xavier Liard and Romain Tisserand are back and have just launched their new publishing company, Playdigious. The new venture plans to focus on premium and mid to hardcore freemium games.

"By establishing Playdigious, we want to bring a new alternative to game developers where we focus on publishing and they focus on making great games," Liard told GamesIndustry.biz

"Our immediate priority is to acquire or license existing or new high quality premium games. Thanks to our experience at DotEmu we have a good knowledge about how to be successful for such games. There is also a lot opportunities for premium games out of the major mobile stores such as subscription services in Brazil, Japan and local deals on Android Console, Android TV etc."

"Our immediate priority is to acquire or license existing or new high quality premium games"

Liard cites one of the company's first deals with Pastagames for Pix The Cat, which will be released in fall on Nvidia Shield, Android TV and tablets, as an example of this strategy.

"Usually, game developers don't bother to go out of the major stores because it require integrating third party SDK, updating the UI etc without getting a good visibility about the revenues it would bring back. If the developer wishes to disclose its source code we take care of all this internally at Playdigious."

DotEmu was founded in 2007 and was best known for porting and distributing retro titles like Final Fantasy VII, Heroes of Might and Magic III HD and Metal Slug X. Liard and Tisserand also revealed they sold the company last September to a private investor who plans to continue their work in the retro market.

The moves leaves the pair able to focus on the new freemium market, which Liard is keen to get stuck in to. He explained the Playdigious strategy for handly this tempestuous sector of the industry.

"The first step would be to aggregate existing freemium back catalog games regardless of the ARPU. Thanks to our technical skills and relationship with mobile distributors we will work on major updates to improve metrics, reduce recurrent costs, invest into advanced cross marketing tools and R&D," he explains.

"Once our DAU would reach the required threshold to leverage other's games efficiently, we will publish new freemium games especially coming from the Asian markets. We will keep the number of new freemium games launched per year very low to strengthen our forces. In terms of editorial strategy we will focus on games sharing a similar 'gamer' audience to improve cross-marketing metrics. To conclude, our goal is to become a top rated publisher esteemed by game developers, distributors and players."