BBC ‘wants partnerships for retail games’

The BBC wants some of its biggest brands to lead a new wave of boxed retail games, an executive at the company has said.

The broadcaster is seeking both publisher and studio partnerships with a view to creating games based on some of its famous TV series, according to CVG.

Last year, BBC Worldwide – the commercial arm of the broadcaster – released a downloadable game based on the Doctor Who franchise.

It is now reported that the BBC is also keen on working with novel technologies such as Kinect, Wii U and tablets.

Simon Harris, who heads up BBC Worldwide’s games division, said "Kinect makes a huge amount of sense," for certain BBC brands and described the Wii U as "a really interesting product".

"I think the challenge is for us to get [our brands as] games into something like retail," Harris said.

Last week, Harris revealed the BBC will launch a British indie publishing initiative ‘within weeks’.

Speaking with CVG, Harris said “we want to get together with partners. We are very excited to hear what their plans are in that area and yes we’ll be looking at whether there are really good strategic partnerships on our brands that we can bring to those platforms as well.”

Harris implied that Nintendo’s next console will be a key candidate for games development.

“Nintendo are currently a market leader on consoles so when they do something new you’d better sit up and take notice and try and see if we can become involved in it," Harris said.