Supreme Commander 2, brought to you by Square-Enix

They may just be acting as the publisher/distributor for the Asian market.

Nope, according to the press release they are The Publisher.

 

 

Ehm, it doesn't actually mention who the developer will be. You think it'd be GPG, but who knows these days with IP rights rarely residing with said IP's creator.

I hope we don't just get some second rate knockoff by another dev team.....

I thought THQ have the publishing rights, but I guesss its different in Japan. Does Japan even have a huge rts market on PC there? All they mostly have is those anime dating, mmo, and some shooters. If I remember right there is also some C&C commericals in Japanese back in the days.

Sorry, I should have linked to Kotaku's post on it instead of RPS' as it has the full press release, which clears up a couple of those points.

http://kotaku.com/5084176/supreme-commander-2-brought-to-you-by-square-enix

"London (12th November 2008) – Square Enix Ltd., the publisher of Square Enix® interactive entertainment products in Europe and other PAL territories (Square Enix), today announces that Square Enix, Inc., a U.S. sister company headquartered in Los Angeles, California, and development house Gas Powered Games Corp., a U.S. company headquartered in Redmond, Washington (Gas Powered Games) have formed a strategic partnership. With the commencement of this strategic partnership, development has begun on SUPREME COMMANDER® 2, a sequel to the award-winning real-time strategy series."

So it looks most likely that it is indeed GPG working on it, and also that Squenix are responsible for worldwide publishing, as its the Europeon division of them that made the announcement, and that the announcement is about the U.S. division. Why the Europeon company is making announcements on the American division I can't explain. But with Squenix publishing SupCom that's hardly the weirdest thing about all this.

Can someone explain to me the purpose of a publisher (stardock, thq, squarenix)?   Couldn't gpg publish games themselves?   Do they give like 20% of the profit to the publisher?   Publishers advertise, create the box, dvd, manual, and ship them to walmart?  is that it?   I'm also surprise they chose SquareEnix instead of stardock. 

League of Legends by Riots, a small startup company, will be publishing their own game I think.  Couldn't gpg do the same and publish their own game?

 

They also spend the money on advertising (tv spots, magazines, etc). That all tends to cost $$$. Most independent developers (like GPG, Ironclad) don't really have the infrastructure or resources to self-publish. But most developer studios are actually owned by publishers

I was really wanting Stardock to do SupCom2

Well, here's hoping SupCom doesnt just turn into another flying giant robots with gay swords or some crap.

Square Enix probably gave GPG incredibly favorable rates and terms.  They are willing to take a loss to break into a new market/business with a game that has pedigree.  Regardless of how well SD and GPG work together in business terms it probably made more sense to go with Square.  

Another thing publishers often do is supply the developers with an advance, bankrolling the development. Also they often perform the market research, and then provide feedback to the developers (or just forcing it upon them) in order to try and make the game sell more. The role of the publisher can vary, and depends on the specific publisher and relationship\agreement between the publisher and the developer.

 

Read a point made by someone somewhere else that reminded me that Sega were the ones who published Space Siege, so perhaps this move isn't as odd as first thought. Guess GPG must look really attractive to Japanese publishers.

How bizzare. I just had a look at Wikipedia's list of Square-Enix games, and it doesn't look like they've done anything like Supcom before. Hopefully they won't push for a console version.

Anyway, good luck GPG, differentiate the factions more for this one please.

Would be suprising if it was computer only, their only no-console game yet was Everquest 2 and Supreme Commander had a console port

All of GPG's previous games have been published by different companies.  Seems pretty usual for them.

Sounds like GPG may just like to play the field and get the best deal they can on a per game basis. Would of liked to have seen SD lock them in for all their titles though.

I think THQ has been having financial issues so I wouldn't be surprised if Square Enix bought the rights to publish the Supcom series from THQ.

The only thing i trust Square Enix to do is publish good Japanese RPGs, like i would only trust Betheseda to make quality non linear RPGs, when Betheseda publishes Star Trek games for all platforms, their PC ST title was a total disaster.  I am not sure if they were to blame or Mad Dog Developers were to blame. This is like asking id Software, the maker of Doom series to make a sequel to Baulder's Gate, or Egosoft to develop an RTS.