Wants to keep its ambition in check
While Koch Media isn’t a household name, it and Deep Silver have been in the background for years, and its recent acquisition of Saints Row maker Volition and the Metro property helped to raise awareness of the German media group — at least among this audience. Speaking to GamesIndustry International, CEO Klemens Kundratitz says “I appreciate that we now get more of the spotlight with these new IPs, but, having said that, we are not ambitious to be the next THQ.”
According to Kundratitz, “It’s important that you understand who you are and what you’re capable of doing. Other publishers are very ambitious, but they aspire to grow their businesses in ways that aren’t healthy. That’s a problem of publicly listed companies, which go from quarter to quarter and are pushed into this ambitious way of running their businesses. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always pay off.”
The CEO has “no doubt” we’ll be getting Metro: Last Light and the next Saints Row this year as originally intended. “I think it would have been daunting two years ago, but we have really come a long way since we started publishing,” he explained. “With Dead Island, for the first time we had a global success. One thing leads to the next, and after Dead Island to go a bigger step further, it’s not something we don’t know enough about. We have grown and matured as an organization in a way that enables us to take on a project of that size.”
Koch Media: “We are not ambitious to be the next THQ” [Games Industry International]
