Runescape developer Jagex announced it’s entered a new partnership with developer Snowcastle Games. Through its publishing arm Jagex Partners, it’ll publish the Norwegian studio’s next three games, all of which will be installments in its RPG series, Earthlock.
This new deal makes Snowcastle the fourth developer to become a part of Jagex’s publishing arm as it expands beyond game development. Jagex started its Partners program in 2018 with the goal of publishing live games from indie developers on PC, console, and mobile.
Snowcastle was founded in 2011, and gained attention following the release of the original Earthlock in 2014. That first game was published by Sodesco, but under this new deal, Jagex will publish the incoming sequel, the spinoff Ikonei Island (which is currently in Early Access), and an unannounced title.
“Jagex’s history with working with a large community of players to grow their game is really important to us,” explained creative director Bendik Stang in a press release. “We knew we needed a partner for Ikonei and Earthlock 2 that would help us go even further.”
For Jagex, the partnership also gets it more games to add to its portfolio, and another community-centric title to grow into a sustainable entity. When it released its financial report from this past October, Jagex noted that Partners would have “significant continued growth” next year via current and future partnerships.
“At Jagex Partners, we’re focused on community-driven games that grow alongside their players,” said Jagex partnership VP Jeff Pabst. “Snowcastle’s community-first approach with Earthlock lines up nicely with what we’re looking to achieve here.”
In 2018, following the release of Earthlock on Nintendo Switch, we published a pair of post-mortems about the game written by Stang. The first post-mortem was about the changes made to improve the game’s initial reception, and the second focused on the process of ensuring day one players could get the newer version of Earthlock at no extra charge.