Harvey Elliott, the CEO of Balatro and Abiotic publisher Playstack, has said the firm’s sale to the owner of Fandom and GameSpot will not impact either, telling GamesIndustry.biz that new owner Integrated Media Company (IMC) had committed to maintaining Playstack separately from its media investments.
“IMC is not a huge organization themselves,” he says. “They’ve invested in multiple businesses. They’ve got four verticals which operate in different sectors and we’re in games publishing, we’re a completely different sector to everything they do. Even though they’ve got games related stuff, we’re not in the same division.” He says that the firm will not be sharing any systems because “there’s no one to integrate with, no one’s changing very much.”
“There’s no financial systems to integrate with. They certainly don’t have any QA or localization teams, finance functions, [they’re] really very much around fund finance, not operational. So there’s nothing to integrate.” He says that no staff will be leaving the business and it will continue to operate as before, and that IMC play and understand games “but they’re not offering us design choices and opinions. They’re very respectful of the choices that we make and I think that’s what they’ve bought.”
He says he was “pleasantly surprised by the interest” shown in the company when it started exploring sale options last year, and that IMC won out due to its scale compared to previous owner TruFin. Playstack’s recent success, driven chiefly by Balatro and Abiotic Factor, had made it “proportionally quite a large part of the Trufin portfolio”.
“If you’re 80% of what your organization does, then decisions I make affect them a lot,” he says. “We need to be in a group where I can make those decisions and it doesn’t move from 80%. It’s a fraction of what they do. So for me, it was finding someone with a scale that could allow us to operate in that way and there will definitely be connections they’ve got that we don’t have.”
The firm has nine releases planned for this year, and knows “everything but perhaps one game for next year, and we’ve got a really good slate for 2028,” says Elliott, the bulk of which will be original IP. The firm has delivered sequels for the Golden Idol and Mortal Shell franchises but “the range is going to be eclectic and that’s what we like, the variety publisher angle,” he says. “We’re also not losing sight of games like Balatro and Abiotic Factor, which have such phenomenal reach already and there’s more we can do helping those games reach more and more players.”
TruFin had previously touted Playstack’s success at backing new titles, claiming that more than 85% of the titles it backed had generated a return on investment. Elliott says that the firm is “very rigorous on data and analytics” with a keen market understanding of “what might be the start of a new genre or category or subcategory,” but that “this is a people business and people on the ground talking to developers is generally how you find out about things,” citing the recent success of Raccoin which was signed after the developer Doraccoon approached them directly.
Elliott says that one of the “fundamental rules of the business” is that it “won’t make a penny out of a game until the developers are making money from the game,” which means it relies on a rigorous forecasting process on the titles it signs and invests in. He describes the firm’s current strategy as supporting “games that are sub a million dollars investment spend, but we have every year one or two, possibly a couple more, that are a bit beyond that. And that’s because the numbers support it, the justification is there, the team are passionate about it, we believe in the game and the creative.”
He says that “the capacity’s definitely there” with the new owner to make bigger bets, but “I’m always going to work from the numbers. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.” The backing could result in “maybe investing in titles for a slightly longer timescale, but not a fundamental change.”
“I think there’s lots of potential for us, whether that’s growing PlayStack, whether we look at opening up in new markets or growing other opportunities,” he says. “What we don’t feel now, which we might have felt before, is that there’s a barrier on whether we choose to do something, whether we’ve got the ability to do it.”
