Why Ghost Ship is sailing into publishing

gamesindustry.biz:

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Ghost Ship Games' decision to open a publishing label happened two ways; gradually and then suddenly.

Having had success with co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic, the company has been playing a supporting role within the Danish industry for some time and investing in developers. Over time, the question was asked whether the firm should start publishing other studios' games.

"Specifically with our experience and success with Steam Early Access and games-as-a-service on that platform, others were asking us how we did that and whether we could help them," Ghost Ship CEO Søren Lundgaard tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"Then we asked ourselves why we shouldn't start publishing games. Maybe that is the right thing to do. As soon as we started this and went into it, it felt really natural to us to do actually. So I think it's been inevitable. It had to happen basically."

Part of the reason for the delay was the fact that Ghost Ship already has a publisher, Coffee Stain, which is owned by the same company, Embracer Group. Initially, the plan was for Funday Games to partner with Coffee Stain for Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, but the company decided to do it itself.

"We do not have any financial goals. This is about helping developers bring passion projects to life"

"We've announced three titles so far," Lundgaard says. "For the first one, DarkSwarm, we'd already spoken to Bitfire Games a year ago in the sense that we could publish it. But we were also wondering if we could get Coffee Stain to publish something like that. We just wanted that game to be a reality. We'd also invested in that company.

"Then the more we talked with them, we could see that it would