Viz Media to publish its first game, Rose City Games’ The World Next Door

With a history steeped in Japanese culture, including top-tier manga and anime localisation and distribution deals, it’s a wonder that it’s taken this long for Viz Media to dip a toe into the waters of the games industry. The publisher has announced a partnership with developer Rose City Games, which previously has mainly offered PR and marketing support for other developers. The World Next Door will be the studio’s first original game.

This will be the first of three games developed by Rose City Games as part of this partnership with Viz, and the two companies are working together to launch a “new indie game publishing platform”. The World Next Door started life (as so many great indie games do) as an internal game jam project.

“It’s no secret that anime and manga fans love video games,” says Brad Woods, chief marketing officer at VIZ Media, in a press release. ”We’re excited to be able to bring an entirely new offering to our audience. VIZ Media has always been fan-first, and the team at Rose City is the perfect fit for developing games that our audience will love.”

“We’re very excited to collaborate with VIZ Media and the amazing creators in our indie game communities,” say Will Lewis and Corey Warning, co-directors and co-founders of Rose City Games. “The ability to pursue multiple original titles as independent developers is huge for us, and this partnership presents the potential to expand the worlds we’re creating beyond games.”

We’ll be hearing a lot more about The World Next Door, a gorgeous looking narrative game set “in a parallel world inhabited by magical creatures”, so make sure to follow Rose City on twitter to stay up to date.

Viz Media is “is currently accepting publishing inquiries from developers with games at all stages of production”, so if you’re a dev looking for a publishing partner, you know what to do.