Take-Two’s Private Division signs new games from Sonic Mania devs, Die Gute Fabrik, more

Take-Two Interactive’s indie-focused publishing label Private Division announced new agreements with four studios, Die Gute Fabrik, Evening Star, Piccolo Studio, and Yellow Brick Games, on Wednesday. The announcement means new games from the teams behind Sega’s Sonic Mania and AAA franchises like Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six are coming from Private Division in the next few years.

The first of those games, which are still unannounced, is expected to arrive sometime after April 1, 2023, the start of Take-Two’s 2024 fiscal year.

Die Gute Fabrik is known for local multiplayer games Sportsfriends and Johann Sebastian Joust, and for 2019 IGF and Indiecade award-winner Mutazione, the mutant soap opera that we called one of the year’s best-written games. Hannah Nicklin, studio lead and creative director at Die Gute Fabrik, described the studio’s next game as a story-driven adventure.

Evening Star was founded in 2018 by developers behind Sonic Mania and Sonic Mania Plus — Christian Whitehead, Dave Padilla, Tom Fry, Hunter Bridges, and Brad Flick — and will see the team expanding its horizons in a new 3D action-platformer. Evening Star is building its unannounced game in the studio’s proprietary Star Engine.

Piccolo Studio is the developer of Arise: A Simple Story, a 3D narrative adventure with intriguing time-manipulation puzzles. The studio is developing a “unique new IP,” Private Division said in a news release.

Yellow Brick Games, founded in 2020 by former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw, with Ubisoft veterans Thomas Giroux (The Crew), Jeff Skalski, and Frederic St.-Laurent B. (both Assassin’s Creed Syndicate), is developing “an ambitious new action RPG” for Private Division. Laidlaw said in a news release that his studio’s partnership with the label enables it to take “risks that might not be possible in AAA game development.”

Private Division was formed in 2017, and has since published Panache Digital Games’ Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds, V1 Interactive’s (now shuttered) Disintegration, and OlliOlli World. In 2020, Private Division announced game-publishing agreements with Moon Studios, League of Geeks, and Roll7 — the latter of which Private Division acquired in November.