Modern Wolf announced its existence to the world at Gamescom – a new publisher aimed at bringing an array of “strategy and strategy-adjacent” indie titles to market. After announcing its lineup, the company has already taken a hard stand against crunch, and the publisher isn’t shying away from serious political messages, either.
At Gamescom, CCO Andreas Gschwari tells us that Modern Wolf aims to let independent studios continue to do their thing – even if you’re not techically ‘indie’ once you’ve signed with a publisher. Gschwari says that “indie has always just meant independent. Just being published doesn’t mean losing the status of being independent.” And that means letting creators say what they want to say, too.
“Look at the Call of Duty dev who said ‘Call of Duty is an apolitical game,’ which is a transparently, hilariously wrong thing to say,” CEO Fernando Rizo tells us in reference to an already-infamous Game Informer interview. “But this is also a guy sitting in the pilot’s chair for an enormous publicly-traded company that represents thousands of jobs – of course that’s what they’re going to say.
“Of course CoD is a political game, but it’s naive to hope that an enormous publicly-traded company and its representatives would ever make any sort of political statement. Whereas I’m not remotely afraid to make unabashedly political games.”
We might see one of those political games sooner rather than later, too. Rizo says “the guys making Necronator, the thing they’ve pitched us next is an anti-colonial game, told from the point of view of Southeast Asian people, and I said ‘fuck yes, we want that.’”
Rizo adds that “we’re not afraid to make political statements. If that’s what defines indie, then we’ll make that, and I’m not afraid to claim that name.”