News
Two Tribes is Rebooting
January 8, in the year of our Lord 2014
- Looking at our busy release schedule you probably wouldn’t
have guessed, but in the last two months of 2013 our office has
been largely empty.
There was no programming, no designing, no fun to be had, just
co-founders Martijn and Collin taking care of the business end
of things. In this case the ‘business end’ can be taken quite
literally. The old Two Tribes, founded in 2001, doesn’t exist
anymore and we had to send everyone home.
Before we go into details…
The Facts
The old Two Tribes B.V., who employed the developers, is now
gone.
Its parent company, Two Tribes Publishing B.V., that owns and
publishes all our games and handles all contracts, remains
unaffected.
A new daughter company has been formed and it will handle the
development of future titles.
The original founders Martijn Reuvers and Collin van Ginkel
aren’t going anywhere.
With that out of the way, let’s say goodbye first.
Bye Old Friend!
We’ve been making games for more than 13 years, so you can
imagine how much it - quite frankly - sucks when after a four
minute meeting at the courthouse, the company we built was no
more. At the same time, we knew we were kinda stuck in the past
and this was our chance to change things drastically.
In 2009 we started the transition from doing work for hire to
becoming the Indie studio we had always wanted to be. We’re
super proud of what we’ve achieved in recent years, but the
company that resulted from that transition still held on to too
many ideas and values from the old days. It’s difficult to make
fundamental changes, but late October last year we had no other
option. When Toki Tori 2 ended up taking way longer than
expected and not achieving the sales we needed, it basically
took the company down with it.
There’s a lot to learn from what went wrong and what we could
have done better and we’ll definitely write up a few blog-posts
in the future on that! But now it’s time to move forward and
look to the future!
Reboot!
For the outside world nothing much will change. Two Tribes
Publishing is still in good shape and all our previous games
will remain for sale. With the support of you, our players, the
games will supply the funding for our new titles which will be
released under the Two Tribes name.
We’ve got a ton of hindsight to work with and we’re going to be
applying the lessons we learned to the new Two Tribes. Behind
the scenes things will change quite a bit. We’ve decided to move
away from creating custom technology and focus on what’s readily
available. As a result we’ll be working with a much smaller team
on our next game, a 2D side scrolling shooter, which will be
re-using the existing Toki Tori 2+ engine.
Our focus will be on the design of our games, which we plan on
making more of in less time than before.
A Massive Thanks!
We know it has been a rough couple of months for everyone
involved, most of our natives spent between four and nine years
of their lives at Two Tribes.
We want to take this opportunity to thank - in no particular
order - Eelke, Hessel, Meinte, Marco, Jeroen, Paul, Jay and Shan
for being super understanding and showing true character by
sticking with us until the very last moment. You guys and girl
have been the backbone of Two Tribes for many years and for us
it feels like saying goodbye to friends instead of co-workers.
You’ll be missed! We hope that you land safely at some awesome
company of your choosing!
THANKS!!!
Original story