For a while now the label “Bungie Aerospace” has had our brows in a permanent state of arousal. Eli has been complaining for weeks about wrinkles and pain, to give you a slight indication of how we’re injuring ourselves over the mysterious trademark. And while most has been revealed around the subject, we’ll have to continue fretting over what it is and what it means to mobile gaming. You see, Bungie Aerospace is the start of a program that might be huge for independent developers and their games.
To clue you in from the get-go, Bungie Aerospace is a new initiative from within Bungie to help smaller developers launch mobile and social games. Aerospace will help studios fund their titles, give them evangelists in the form of the company’s rich community, and even leverage their game in the new Bungie mobile application. As if that wasn’t enough, apparently it’ll also help with testing.
In a conversation with Kotaku, Bungie COO Pete Parsons shed some light on the new initiative, which apparently already has several developers lined up.
“We’re excited to have this small, focused effort to work with some great game development talent," he said. “All of them are very, very talented, very, very passionate and excited to bring their games to life. We’re going to help them do that along the way."
But what’s the connection with “Crimson" if there is one? The good news, especially for my credibility, is that there is a connection between Aerospace and the trademark for the game Crimson.
Crimson is actually a codename for the first project to come out of the initiative. No one is willing to deliver any meaningful details about the title at this point, but we do know that the developer is Harebrained Schemes and it’s due out at some point this summer.
The speculation is that this could be some sort of flight game. Jordan Weisman, who had a hand in Crimson Skies, leads Harebrained, so that seems as educated of a guess as any we’ve been hearing … but, obviously, the guy can branch out.
It’ll be interesting to see how this initiative pans out and who profits more — Bungie or the small studios it’s aiding. Furthermore, Kotaku reports that games developed on this platform will also get access to Bungie.NET’s glorious stat tracking stuff, so prepare to see a lot of stat menus in the future.
If you’d like to read more about what’s going on here, check out the official Bungie FAQ thingy on the subject.
[Via Kotaku]
