Curve Studios: There May Still Be More PlayStation Exclusives from Us This Year

Curve Studios has quickly become one of the many faces of PlayStation’s indie initiative. An industrious London-based developer, the company has been quietly porting big-time PC titles and creating its own roster of content for Sony’s suite of systems for some time now. In fact, so prolific has the developer’s output been on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and Vita, that we physically gasped earlier today when we read that Stealth Inc 2 would be sneaking onto the Nintendo Wii U as an exclusive.

An industrious developer, Curve has been quietly bringing big titles to Sony’s systems for some time now

Long time readers will be familiar with the franchise, of course, as the outfit famously asked PlayStation fans to name it. Due to the title adopting the less-than-ideal Stealth Bastard moniker on the PC, the firm needed a new title for the series before it could bring it to the PlayStation Network, and so it appealed to PlayStation Blog readers to come up with something different. Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark was the best entry, and it’s stuck in the years since.

However, despite the series now having strong ties to Sony’s systems, the franchise’s Metroidvania-esque successor will forgo the industry’s fastest selling format in favour of the House of Mario’s black box – a somewhat unexpected announcement following the reveal of a further twelve PS4 indie titles overnight. For the studio, though, this represents an opportunity for it to try something different, and break the minor misconception that it’s a PlayStation-only developer.

“The reality is that I think that people have come to know us as a ‘PlayStation’ developer in the last few years,” public relations and marketing manager Rob Clarke told us shortly after the unveiling. “That’s not unfair, considering that we’ve released around eight separate items including DLC on PlayStation formats in a year or so, and we’re always talking about our experiences working with PlayStation.” Alas, the spokesperson was keen to point out that its history spans further than that.

“If you look back a bit further, you’ll see that before PlayStation we had been making exclusive games on the Nintendo 3DS, Wii, and PC years before we released Stealth Inc on the PS3,” he continued. “Getting that chance to work with Nintendo is excellent, but that doesn’t mean that we’re abandoning PlayStation at all – we’ve got three games coming out on PlayStation versus one coming out on the Wii U.”

Our shock at the initial announcement perhaps speaks to the work that Sony’s done in the indie space over the past couple of years

It’s a fair point, and our shock at the initial announcement perhaps speaks to the incredible work that Sony’s done in the indie space; with so many titles announced for the various PlayStation platforms, it’s hard to shake the feeling of shock when one opts to skip on the PS4 or Vita. Alas, as already alluded, this doesn’t signal the end of a beautiful relationship between Curve Studios and Sony. “I’d be very surprised if we didn’t announce at least a few more PlayStation exclusive titles this year,” he continued.

But does that mean that we’ll never get to play Stealth Inc 2 on the Vita – a platform that proved the perfect home for the original's fusion of swift espionage and slick platforming? “I can’t talk about any plans for [that] beyond the Nintendo Wii U right now,” Clarke concluded. A carefully considered response, then – but if this industry’s taught us anything over the past few years, it’s that third-party exclusives rarely stay that way for long...