Birthed from the popularity of no-budget online hit Red vs. Blue, local media trendsetter Rooster Teeth has become an entertainment colossus, expanding into podcasts, live-action shows, a convention, and even their own anime series.
Given their apparent ambition to conquer every aspect of video game and geek culture, it was only a matter of time until they started putting out games themselves.
Rooster Teeth Games is the company’s newly announced publishing arm focusing on releasing titles from independent developers. Like most publishers, they’ll help studios with marketing, legal support, and distribution, but Rooster Teeth is also uniquely positioned to leverage their experience in merchandising to their existing fan base. Considering the millions of monthly visitors to their website and the tens of millions of subscribers to their YouTube channels, it’s easy to see how this kind of built-in exposure could be enticing to devs looking to get their game in front of more eyeballs.
While Rooster Teeth has technically published a video game before – the 2016 web series tie-in RWBY: Grimm Eclipse – the first game from an outside developer coming out under the Rooster Teeth Games label will be Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars. Battlesloths is a local joint, the first game by secretive Austin-based studio Invisible Collective. In it, up to four players can battle one another as weapon-brandishing three-toed sloths fighting over control of slices of pizza.
Rooster Teeth joins kindred publishers like Austin-based Devolver Digital and the game-publishing label of cable channel Adult Swim, seeking out smaller games with a strong sense of style and presenting them to a wider audience. For Rooster Teeth Games, that style is, for now, defined by pizza-loving, violent sloths. Sounds about right to us.
This article appears in January 27 • 2017.