Sometimes, developers just don’t get along with publishers, mainly due to a project not quite panning out as originally intended. Ask Platinum Games or Lionhead Games after their work with Microsoft, as their subsequent Scalebound and Fable Legends titles were cancelled for Xbox One last year.
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But Undead Labs has a different story. The company recently spoke with Gamespot about its relationship with Microsoft, which it’s teamed up with to produce the Xbox One exclusive State of Decay 2.
Undead Labs CEO Jeff Strain said that the company backed the original State of Decay when no one else would, and that partnership has gotten even stronger with the sequel set to go in a matter of weeks.
“They own the name and the specific incarnation of it. Microsoft backed a game that nobody in their right mind should have touched,” said Strain. “We talked to them from the very beginning. I mean, we’re in Seattle, they’re in Redmond. I knew that I wanted to build a great console game and a great PC game, and it just made sense to work with them. But going out with a game that’s permadeath, which at the time in 2009/10 when we started developing nobody was doing. That’s game design 101. You don’t do permadeath, are you guys on crack?
“And also with that just kind of general formula that I was talking about, there were no comparables. Big publishers get nervous when they can’t say, ‘Oh, it’s like PUBG, only it’s got dragons.’
“So we came up with this grand vision for what this thing could be, and to their great credit, the folks at Microsoft said yeah, let’s give it a go. And so they’ve been a good partner and as long as we’re making State of Decay games, Microsoft will be our partner in that.”
Now the big question is…what if Undead Labs wants to work on something different and not necessarily State of Decay games? It hasn’t gotten to that point, but that’ll be an interesting bridge when the developer gets to it.
That’s far off, though. State of Decay 2 releases on May 22 for Xbox One and Windows 10.
