Five developers recently started up Hutch Games after leaving Sony’s London studio. While they were keen to emphasize that the decision to leave was amicable, the appeal of iOS development was the deciding factor.
“We had had a project cancellation,” art director Whill Whitaker. “It was an inciting incident. It was just very exciting for us to realize we could do something on Unity. The App Store allowing you to self-publish is a very democratizing situation. We were all motivated to take accountability for our own destiny. It was a very exciting thing to try out.”
“It didn’t happen at a fast enough pace for us,” said technical director Sean Turner. “We would get behind an idea and you didn’t have the control to continue or thrust ideas forwards as much as we’d like. So possibly that lack of control was the impeding thing, not lack of creativity.”
Hutch recently released its first game, an iOS racing title called Smash Cops, and is working in a production capacity with Microsoft Soho Productions on Sesame Street Kinect.
“Console games, which cost upwards of 10 million bucks to make, these companies, like Sony and Microsoft, they can’t take quite so many risks with them because there’s so much money involved,” added Whitaker. “One of the things that attracted me was, let’s just do something that’s innovative and quick to make and we can just get on and do it and there’s a lot less bureaucracy and money men behind it. It’s liberating.”
Source: Eurogamer
