Indie-Developer Zaxis Felt Let Down by Chillingo

Still going to continue making games and even thinking about expanding

By Bert Baker

After their debut release “Angry Vikings” got unwanted but helpful publicity from a Russian hacker who broke the game and published it for free, indie developer Zaxis wanted to take the high road with their second game “Harry the Fairy”.

This high road included “Chillingo” – the publisher and marketer who helped Rovio make their “Angry Birds” a huge success. After having a lot of trouble getting in contact with Chillingo Jacob Honore, CEO of Zaxis Games, hunted down the representative of Chillingo and persuaded him into taking care of Zaxis Games and Harry the Fairy.

But this care taking did not work out so well, as Honore told us in an interview:

“They could have, with very little effort, answered all our questions and make sure that we produced a better product in the end.”

This was even more confusing for Zaxis due to the fact that Chillingo was in for a cut of 35% of the revenue of a sold unit of Harry the Fairy. Having Apple taking another big chunk of the profit, there is not that much left for Zaxis to begin with. Nevertheless, Honore told us that Zaxis is staying in the gaming business and even thinking about conquering new worlds.

“In our future productions we are going to actually make sure […] that we can export the games to different platforms. […] There is going to be a lot of different devices that we want our games applied for and build them for different control schemes for the different platforms.”

Taking this course Honore hopes to put their skills in high-end 3D graphics, which they worked with prior to games, into use making games, because he believes that “gaming and high-end 3D is – somehow – going to fuse […] in the future.” Until this happens Zaxis will publish a second season for Harry the Fairy and work on a new gaming project – this time without Chillingo.