Two Tribes has announced on their official blog that the company is in the process of rebooting, as the original Two Tribes has been gone for two months now.
To get into the nitty gritty details, Two Tribes B.V, which made games since 2001 (starting with Toki Tori on the Game Boy Color), has dissolved, taking all the developers save cofounders Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel. However, Two Tribes Publishing B.V, which is for all intents and purposes the parent company, is still in operation, and was active while they published Toki Tori 2+, Two Tribes Classics, Edge, and Rush (On Wii U and Steam) for the past two months. Now, they are forming a new daughter company, presumably a smaller operation, to keep making games.
The news is bittersweet in that Two Tribes will actually still be around, possibly under a different name, but still active. The sadness is that the company was not able to make as much money as projected and was forced to lay off staff, after their most ambitious outing embodied in Toki Tori 2.
In another angle, we usually think of the big AAAs when it comes to companies that run into financial problems, but clearly, indies are facing a harsh market as well. This may be an unwelcome reminder, but February last year Arkedo Studios announced that the company was going to stop making games, not too long after releasing Hell Yeah! Wrath of The Dead Rabbit, on the Playstation 3. Much like Toki Tori 2, Wrath of The Dead Rabbit was also an ambitious outing for the company, and it seemed that in both cases, they were not able to garner the interest that they had hoped, and so sales fell below expectations.
Two Tribes mentions that it will be interesting when they get to the post-mortem on Toki Tori 2, but here and now, they’re sure that they didn’t sell as many games as they expected to, and so it’s come to this. Still, shrinking the company is better than outright losing it, and if more indies are facing this possibility in the near future, at least we know their chances of sticking around are better than the bigger devs.
We wish the departing Two Tribes developers the best of luck in their future endeavors, and look forward to the new company and the games they will be making soon.
Image is from Toki Tori 2+. Are you a Steam User? You can buy Toki Tori 2+ here (also links to Two Tribes’ game bundle).
