Sidhe: Shatter dev plans to eventually wean itself off third-party publishers

Sidhe, which developed the very popular Shatter for PSN, has said it plans to eventually wean itself  off third-party publishers by focusing more on the downloadable space in 2011.

Speaking in an interview with Joystiq, the firm's co-founder Mario Wynands said Sidhe plans to become more independent, especially "given where retail in general is going".

"[We want to] run the studio on the basis of royalties and download revenue alone, as opposed to being somewhat reliant on third-party publishers," he said. "We are, I guess, reacting to the market, in line with the strategy we've had in place for a number of years now, which is ultimately weaning ourselves off work for hire.

"We're still doing retail products, but trying to do retail products where we are being more selective about partners, more selective about what projects we take on, and continuing to transition the amount of resources that we have working on the work-for-hire side, increasingly to the download space."

To Sidhe, the download space consists of Android, iDevices, tablets, Steam, PSN and XBLA.

Wynands said new project announcements made by the firm and its partners over the next few months will emphasize how the developer is "approaching things in a smarter way" than it has in the past."

Following the completion of Blood Drive for Activision, which was released in November, the studio plans to forgo renewing or taking on new vendor contracts so as to focus on its own development titles as well as finishing up Rugby Challenge - a game featuring rugby legend Jonah Lomu and slated for release in Q3 2011 for PC and consoles.