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The company behind Masterchef, Mr Bean and Pointless has opened a standalone games label in London.
Endemol Shine has launched Good Catch, a developer and publisher that will focus primarily on mobile development, although it will also create products for PC and console, too.
Its first game will be Black and White Bushido on consoles. The game was first release on Steam via Green Man Gaming.
Endemol Shine is a big global TV company, and it has been doing bits and pieces in the digital space,” Good Catch MD Anil Mistry told MCV.
We’ve done a few things like the Pointless quiz app. But we were outsourcing a lot of development. If we want to do this properly, we need to get some investment and a bigger team.
What we were doing wasn’t very cohesive. The idea behind Good Catch is to create a label, a standalone game developer and publisher, and bring all those different bits together under one header.”
He added: We are effectively a standalone company that is wholly owned by Endemol Shine. The idea behind that is that we have set up a brand that can be consumer and industry facing. The TV and games industries are incredibly different and we wanted our own identity.
Good Catch gives us access to brands, it gives us reach, but it gives us independence as well. We’ve been doing this for a while, and we’ve made some good decisions and bad decisions. We have experience and teams that are already there, it is about consolidation and moving forward.
The company currently has capacity to work on two projects simultaneously, but is on the hunt for new talent so it can handle four or five projects. Mistry says Good Catch will create games on its big global brands such as Mr Bean and Hunted, but will avoid older, more local IP such as Big Brother or Deal or No Deal. The company is also eager to split its efforts between new and existing IP.
The dream would be to make a game that was our IP, our mechanics, and we can then grow that beyond games,” he said. If we could make a TV show or animation series based on one of our games, that would be great. We have the infrastructure around us that allows us to do that
