Yooka-Laylee Dev Partners With Publisher Team17

Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee now has a publisher… despite raising funds from Kickstarter.

Earlier this year, some of the old Banjo-Kazooie team banded together to form a new studio: Playtonic Games, and announce a new project: Yooka-Laylee. Billed as a “spiritual successor” to Banjo-Kazooie, the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter was fully funded in under an hour. Now, Playtonic has announced a partnership with publisher Team17 (of Worms fame) – a little strange considering one of the main reasons people take to Kickstarter is to free themselves of greedy publishers.

“From the very start we said that we’d welcome only a partner that could genuinely improve the creation of our game, while respecting the independence and creative autonomy of our development team,” explained Playtonic creative lead Gavin Price. He further justified the partnership by assuring fans that “our team can now focus 100 per cent on making Yooka-Laylee, without fussing over boring-but-necessary business stuff like certification, localisation and store management, while at the same time benefiting from the additional resources and vast experience of a seasoned games label.”

Team17 chimed in by adding that “The partnership will allow Playtonic to build on its hugely successful Kickstarter campaign – the biggest ever for a UK game studio – with additional resources designed to benefit development and add value to both existing Kickstarter backers and new fans.”

So it sounds all rosy and good in the world of Yooka-Laylee, but how do you, as a backer, feel about this decision?

Yooka-Laylee has an estimated launch of October 2016 on PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, PC, Mac and Linux.

Source: Kickstarter