Brash: ‘This is just the beginning’

After announcing an agreement with respected Japanese firm Game Republic just yesterday, Hollywood games publisher Brash has signed up another well-known studio, signing American outfit Factor 5 for a multi-game deal.

Factor 5 has worked on a mix of licence-based games, such as Star Wars Rogue Squadron, and original IP including as Lair and Turrican. The studio also boasts plenty of technical expertise, having been a technology partner in the development of both Nintendo’s Wii and GameCube consoles, provider of the MusyX sound tools, partner in the Sony PlayStation 3 Edge toolset group, and a number of collaborations with Dolby Labs, THX, and AMD/ATI.

In the official announcement of the deal, Julian Eggebrecht, president and co-founder of the Californian studio, praised Brash’s approach in aligning key creative talents from the worlds of games and film and helping them work together.

The studio will first work with Brash on an unnamed title due for release in 2010 and to be fully revealed later this year. Brash has been seriously courting third party developers in recent months after its founding last year and raising some $40m investment capital to help fulfill its vision on delivering quality games based on Hollywood-made IPs.

And with 40 movie IP-based games in the works, Brash is hungry for more key deals – and told Develop that the Factor 5 and Game Republic signings are just the start of its ambitious plans to sign up many, many more of the world’s independent developers to help it produce respectable games based on movie properties.

"Game Republic and Factor Five are two very important signings for Brash and it’s a sign of what we want to do," CEO Mitch Davis told Develop.

"We will make a series of announcements over the coming months to continue to show that we want to build very strong partnerships across the globe – we have a lot of very, very high quality licences."