Dinomite Games, Ember Trail, and TIC TEK TOE will join the Kinda Brave Family in their endeavour to create a ‘happy, healthy workspace’ for their employees
Kinda Brave Publishing is a new publisher that hopes to foster a sustainable and friendly work environment for its developers. The company’s goals are succinctly expressed with its “People, Players, and Planet” maxim: Kinda Brave wants to conduct its business so that both its employees and customers benefit, and at no expense to the environment.
While it would be easy to be cynical and assume that the company might be taking advantage of the poor optics that several well-known publishers in the industry have recently cultivated to prop themselves up as different while doing the same thing in the shadows, I’m inclined to think otherwise. Kinda Brave is based in Sweden, and Nordic countries are known to successfully implement socialist policies in their capitalist frameworks to create what has been affectionately called “cuddly capitalism“. They are also using renewable energy to power and heat their offices in Uppsala, so they’ve provided verifiable evidence of their intent. Would be wild if they went to the trouble of constructing this amicable persona only to actually be moustache-twirling villains who set fire to rain forests, overwork their staff, and kick their customer’s puppies. Kinda brave even. But I digress.
Kinda Brave uses a ‘hybrid-indie’ model, which means it doesn’t sign publishing deals with developers, but acquires them and distributes its resources. Today, Kinda Brave has revealed the three studios that will be working under them: Ember Trail, TIC TEK TOE, and Dinomite Games, the latter of which is working on a game for 2023 called Go Fight Fantastic. Due to the nature of their model, Kinda Brave provides them all with the same pool of financial backing, sales, marketing, HR, recruitment, legal services, and sustainability management.
The implementation of these resources is of course made with the “People, Players, and Planet” mindset. The studios will be collaborating with each other’s games, to lessen the workload on any one team. For the player’s sake, considerable time will be allocated to including accessibility features for each of their titles. Kinda Brave also boasts that in its attempt to achieve carbon neutrality wherever it can it will recycle equipment, minimise travel, make judicious use of manufacturers and suppliers, and produce its games with eco-friendly settings.
“We are delighted to be working with the talented teams at Ember Trail, Dinomite Games and TIC TEK TOE. We want all of our studios to feel part of the group, sharing our goals, ethos and culture whilst we will do everything we can to provide them with the resources they need to achieve the results that they want. The Hybrid Indie model of a publisher is not just focused on commercial aspects, but on the everyday support and growth of studios and the people therein, allowing each studio to pour all time and energy into development of quality indie titles.”
Björn Rudolfsson, CEO and co-founder of Kinda Brave
Kinda Brave Publishing represents an interesting approach to videogame publishing and development, one where everyone involved is taken care of. I think it is likely that the unsavoury practices we’ve been seeing in the videogame business are going to continue to be perpetuated, so it brings me comfort knowing that there are wholesome and holistic alternatives to traditional forms of game production. I hope more publishers attempt this approach, and to that end, I encourage everyone reading this to show Kinda Brave their support.
He/Him
A flamboyant ultra nerd, Dave participates in the Underlevelled Tournament both for the thrill of the fight, and to avenge the orphans lost in the climax of the previous tournament.
Born: London
Height: ???
Weight: ???
Hobbies: street dance, collecting manga volumes, reading, editing
Likes: short-to-medium walks on the beach, pointing out how things can and will be misconstrued as racism, fighting games, RPGs, anime, Hades, alternative hip hop, conscious hip hop, Mara Wilson, overly long bios, ice-cream
Dislikes: insincere media, his own uncanny resemblance to Richard Ayoade, mayonnaise
