Transistor Interview

VG247 has talked with Supergiant Games’ creative director Greg Kasavin about the developer’s upcoming title Transistor, which is just about to be released. Predictably the conversation quickly falls over the game’s story and gameplay, but there are also some interesting details on Supergiant’s decision to self-publish it:

As Transistor is coming to PS4 and PC initially, I ask Kasavin about SuperGiant’s decision to forego publishers and fly solo throughout the project. He tells me that Warner Bros’ involvement with Bastion was primarily a pre-requisite to get the game past Microsoft’s Xbox Live certification process, but now that several barriers have been lifted on consoles, the team decided to stay entirely self-sufficient this time around.

(Self-publishing felt like a logical next step,) he states, (as digital publishing has evolved to some extent in the last several years to make it easier for smaller teams like ours to get their games onto different platforms. At this point we have a good-sized following of fans interested in what we’re up to, and we love talking to the gaming press directly. And above all, we love our independence, being able to control and be responsible for every aspect of the games we make. We’ll see how the rest of this process goes for us, though thus far we’ve enjoyed it.)

He recalls that Sony first saw Transistor at the same time it was revealed at PAX East last year, and revealed that the company’s enthusiasm for the game was both (clear and immediate,) with negotiations to bring it to PS4 starting as soon as the show ended.

(The more we learned about the PS4 and the more we saw how serious Sony was about working with a small team like ours, the more we realized it just made a lot of sense,) Kasavin stresses. (They’ve let us do our thing and just wanted Transistor to come out on PS4 whenever we decided it’d be ready, and we decided it’d be ready on May 20. Sony’s put a great deal of faith in our team and our game, as evidenced by how prominently they featured us as part of their E3 presentation this past year.

(While I think it makes sense for Sony to court small independent developers working on interesting games, I also can’t think of what else I’d do if I were in their position. There are far fewer big studios around these days than when the PS3 launched, and consoles needs content. Where else is there to look these days but smaller teams? It helps that smaller teams are responsible for some of the best, most memorable games of the past few years.