NGD Studios has been making games in Argentina for 16 years. Now it wants to help a fellow Argentinian gamemaker bring their debut effort to the market.
Today, NGD announced it’s publishing Saibot Studios’ Hellbound, a 1990s-style first-person shooter that’s a bit of an homage to Doom and Quake. It’s about dealing death to demons. NGD once had a division that made a slew of mobile games, and it also did 2007’s Champions of Regnum (the first MMO from a Latin America developer), Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars for Wargaming in 2016, and some of the DLC for Endless Legend. The deal is a sign of two indie studios partnering in the punishing PC gaming market, where it can be hard for new games to stand out on Steam, the platform’s No. 1 digital storefront.
NGD CEO Martin Cao told GamesBeat that one of the reasons his studio (which has grown to 70 people since its 2002 founding) is publishing Hellbound is because its director, Saibot Studios founder Tobìas Rusjan, once worked there. Rusjan also secured an Unreal Development grant, a program that Epic Games runs to fund startups using its game engine.
Mutual appreciation
Cao also said that NGD just enjoys what Saibot’s doing with Hellbound.
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“It’s a game we love, a genre we love, Cao said, hinting at an unannounced first-person project underway at NGD. “We’ve been working the past two years on our FPS capabilties. I can’t disclose on what, but we’ve been perfecting our skills on this type of game.”
Cao also says this will be more like co-development deal than just a straight partnership. NGD will use its 16 years of development and marketing knowledge to help Saibot with Hellbound.
“Our approach is co-development. We allocate resources on our side,” he said.
Hellbound already has an Early Access demo mode on Steam, and Cao says they’ll target the PC and turn to consider the consoles later.
Cao’s unsure if this is a one-time thing or if NGD will publish other outside projects in the future.
“We are taking things step-by-step. I like to say this was an opportunity where everything fit. We’re not actively looking to pub more titles. We’re taking it one step at a time,” Cao said.
For now, that step takes them from one Argentinian studio to another.
Correction, 7:29 a.m. 9/27: NGD did DLC for Endless Legend, not Endless Space 2. Hellbound is also Saito’s second game, not first. We apologize for the errors.
