League Of Their Own

How Private Division is staking a claim for ‘the new middle’ with two of 2019’s most adventurous new games.

You don’t hear so much talk about the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ these days. Sure, between bedrooms and blockbusters can still be a risky place to be: a no-man’s-land where mid-tier games struggle to gain traction, lacking the development and marketing budgets to compete with the big boys, and with overheads higher than indie teams who don’t need millions of sales to stay in business. And yet that niche seems to be widening. The recent spate of Japanese hits is testament to that, and as the ambitions of successful indies grow, and as high-profile developers leave major franchises to pursue smaller-scale projects, a new wave of publishers is stepping in to help these studios realise their visions.

Enter Private Division. Conceived by Take Two ’s Michael Worosz and Ed Tomaszewski, the subsidiary’s existence was officially announced just over a year ago, in December 2017. But by then it had already been in operation for two years. Allen Murray, an industry veteran with experience at Bungie and PopCap, among others, recalls first meeting with the two in 2015, as the indie studio he’d been running, AtomJack, was shuttered. “When I let them know about the decision to close down, the conversation shifted to, ‘Well, we actually need some help to get this new initiative off the ground.’” Murray tells us. “Over a period of months we found that we had a lot in common and I came on board towards the end of the year. Essentially I was employee number one for the label.”