20th Century Fox Announces Newly Announced Indie Game Development Fund Starting With Etherborn

21st Century Fox’s gaming division, FoxNext Games, has announced the creation of a development fund aimed at helping indie developers generate resources and support.

The first game that will be released as part of its indie games portfolio will be Etherborn and there will be more games announced later this year.

“As passionate creators of games, we’ve been searching for like-minded developers focused on innovation, experimentation and a certain amount of creative risk,” said TQ Jefferson, Vice President, External Development, FoxNext Games. “We’re looking to partner with inspiring game makers, providing the support they need to develop the best version of their games and ultimately connect with the widest audience possible.”

Etherborn is an elegant leap in the gravity-puzzle genre. An environmental puzzle platformer built on exploring and understanding gravity-shifting structures in dreamlike, Escheresque levels. You play as a voiceless being, born into a mysterious world where a bodiless voice calls to you, patiently drawing you to its location. You must take this blank soul on a journey to find its voice and explore the darker tragedy of how knowledge and language misshaped us as people.

Traversal is built around your unique sense of gravity that anchors you to any surface you touch. Moving through the world becomes the puzzle in itself as each level acts as a sort of environmental Rubik’s Cube that you need to explore, manipulate and shift perspective on in order to decipher the way forward.

Etherborn will be released in Spring 2019 on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The fund is for an unspecified amount, and will focus on providing resources and support for independent developers aiming for global launches.

My Take – Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox is due to be finalised later this month, but I am wondering what the future of this division is, especially after Disney’s CEO Bob Iger said earlier this week that they aren’t good at making video games and prefer the licensing model of making games.

However I do like the idea of FoxNext publishing smaller indie titles as there are lots of fantastic games outthere that need promotion.

What do you think of this new indie gaming development?