On the occasion of the Portzamparc Small & Mid Caps Forum, we had the opportunity to discuss with Benoît Gisbert Mora, Finance Director of Don’t Nod. The opportunity for us to better understand the challenges of the video game publishing sector on which the company has built its strategic plan.
The aim is to strengthen the assets in the Action RPG (Role Playing Game) area. In general, Don’tNod strives above all to improve the intellectual property protection of its games, a goal that involves abandoning pure development in favor of self-publishing or co-production. The studio, which has made its mark on the creative side of releasing some of its games like Life is Strange, is no longer content with the developer royalties paid to it. The Parisian company, also based in Montreal since 2020, now wants to enjoy the success of its games to the fullest.
A busy production pipeline
In 2018, a narrative action RPG game called “Vampyr” was released in co-production with Focus Home Interactive. A first rapprochement between the two studios that repeat the experience with the co-production of “Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden”, a role-playing game whose release is scheduled for the end of 2023. When the game’s budget allows, Don’t Nod also utilizes self-publishing, a way for the studio to offer players its own creations by becoming its own publisher. For example, Harmony: The fall of Reverie was released in early June and Jusant is expected next fall. The remainder of the Don’t Nod calendar expands with three more self-releases scheduled for 2024–2025 and two co-productions scheduled for the same period, one with Tolima studio and the other with Tiny Bull studio .
On the other hand, there’s no question of sacrificing the quality of the games to fit within the €10-30 million budget Don’t Nod has imposed on itself by opting to produce so-called AA games. As proof, Benoît Gisbert Mora particularly praises the quality of the facial animations in the game Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, which give the impression of a bigger budget AAA game. A result sublimated by the outsourcing of certain creative phases, such as the composition of certain music, voice and motion capture tasks, for a rendition of remarkable quality.