Skybound Entertainment is a multimedia publishing firm known for putting creators first. The company originated in 2010 as an imprint of Image Comics called Skybound, which Robert Kirkman, the celebrated creator of The Walking Dead and Invincible, founded in order to publish original comic books from up-and-coming writers.
Nearly eight years later, Skybound Entertainment is its own company, a notable player in fields such as comics, television and film. Today, it is expanding its foothold in the gaming market to a full publishing and distribution label. Skybound Games has signed two very different games to start: The Long Dark, a wilderness survival experience from Hinterland Studio, and Slime Rancher, an adorable sci-fi farming simulator by Monomi Park. Both titles were released digitally in August 2017, and Skybound Games is bringing them to retail stores this September on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Skybound’s publishing slate is led by Kirkman’s own graphic novels, including Outcast, Thief of Thieves and the new Oblivion Song. He has filled out the company’s lineup with his eye for talent, which has brought comics such as Birthright and Kill the Minotaur into the fold. In much the same way, Skybound Games CEO Ian Howe could build his new unit into a well-regarded boutique publisher of indie games — and help turn them into films, television shows, comic books and more.
Indie cred
Skybound Games is meant to supplement the company’s existing gaming branch, Skybound Interactive, which will continue to license Skybound brands to third-party studios — it’s responsible for the deals to produce Walking Dead games at Telltale, Overkill Software and Scopely. Although Skybound Entertainment is spinning up Skybound Games to publish indie titles from outside developers, Howe told Polygon in a phone interview that he’s putting together a multifaceted team that can handle a wide variety of services to fit the needs of its partners.
Howe described Skybound Games as “kind of a flexible beast that can morph around what those developers actually need,” and he has plenty of experience with that kind of work. Before joining Skybound last year, Howe had spent more than a decade as the president of another small publisher, 505 Games, which he co-founded in 2006. One of the most beloved and acclaimed indie games that 505 published under Howe’s tenure was 2013’s Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, from a small team at Starbreeze Studios led by a strong-minded director named Josef Fares.
“Josef’s actually the epitome of that: putting the creator at the center of everything,” said Howe. “I did my little part to bring that game to fruition, and yeah, more of those is the idea.”
Skybound Games doesn’t want to limit itself to particular genres, styles or platforms. The guiding principle, according to Howe, is to produce “great games” by “figuring out that equation of ‘good relationships and good talent with good commercial terms equals great product,’ hopefully.” Howe said that Skybound Games is “happy to get involved” at any stage of the development process, including “investing in new product developments” someday.
Skybound’s creator-first ethos doesn’t necessarily mean that its development partners will always retain ownership of their IP. But Howe noted that “not owning the IP is absolutely not a barrier for us,” and it would’ve been absurd in the cases of Slime Rancher and The Long Dark. Both titles have been available for months; Monomi Park and Hinterland will each continue to self-publish the digital versions of their respective games, and their initial deals with Skybound Games are focused on retail distribution.
Raphael van Lierop, founder and creative director at Hinterland, told Polygon in an email that his company simply isn’t equipped to handle retail production and distribution on its own — certainly not at a volume of hundreds of thousands of units. That’s the kind of scale that Howe has the “wherewithal, knowledge, and contacts” to deliver, van Lierop said, mentioning Howe’s decade-plus of retail experience.
The sky’s the limit
Considering that Skybound Entertainment has its fingers in many pies across the media landscape, the potential to bring games to bigger audiences and new formats will certainly prove to be an attractive proposition for developers.
Howe touted his group’s ability to “introduce those creators to the other parts of our Skybound team that can unlock the challenges that exist in those different areas of media” as a competitive advantage over other indie publishers. He also noted that Skybound is judicious and selective in taking its creators’ works to other formats, and never wants to do it just for the sake of having a transmedia project.
It’s a tough line to walk; the world is littered with transmedia ventures that failed, and the track record is particularly bleak for video games. Syfy canceled the television counterpart to the MMO Defiance after three seasons. The mech shooter Hawken was conceived as a transmedia project, and it’s effectively dead, having been taken off Steam earlier this year. Xbox Entertainment Studios, which Microsoft created in part to produce programming based on gaming franchises such as Halo, lasted about 18 months. (Steven Spielberg’s Halo TV series is apparently still in “very active development” at Showtime.) And that’s not even talking about the sad history of game-to-movie adaptations.
Yet Skybound Entertainment has an impressive track record in cross-media projects, especially for a company of its age. Its most successful adaptation by far is AMC’s The Walking Dead, along with the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead. The company also produces a Cinemax series based on Kirkman’s Outcast. Kirkman and Skybound have since signed a TV deal with Amazon. Skybound is also developing a number of films, including ones based on the comics Invincible and Kill the Minotaur and the Korean mobile RPG Summoners War.
Although Skybound Games’ deals with both Hinterland and Monomi Park concern retail distribution, the heads of both studios told Polygon that Skybound’s multimedia capabilities played a role in why they chose to work with the company.
Hinterland always intended to build The Long Dark as a game first and then expand it to other mediums, van Lierop said. He pointed to last year’s announcement that the company is working with Jeremy Bolt, a producer on the Resident Evil movies, on a film adaptation of The Long Dark. Van Lierop said that Hinterland has also discussed bringing The Long Dark to other formats, such as comics, which meant that teaming up with Skybound “made a lot of sense” for both parties.
“I have a lot of respect for Skybound as an IP creator and I think we can learn a lot from working with them, as the partnership with Ian’s group at Skybound Games also brings us access to the entire Skybound ‘wheel of awesome,’” van Lierop added.
Monomi Park was more interested in finding a partner to bring Slime Rancher to store shelves, since the studio “always wanted” a retail version of the game, CEO Nick Popovich told Polygon in an email. At the same time, he noted that Skybound’s potential for multiformat extensions of games factored into his decision. “Having a relationship with a company like that opens up other opportunities for us,” said Popovich, “[versus] a company that exclusively brings digital games to retail.”
That kind of thinking should help Howe achieve his vision for a diverse publishing portfolio at Skybound Games: one part Skybound’s own titles, one part existing games and one part original indie projects. Whatever it ends up being, quality is the priority.
“The services we offer, kind of in a nutshell, would be a range of publishing services that ultimately become distractions from making great games,” said Howe.