Playtonic Games has said that it hopes to attract a broad marketing with its upcoming platformer, Yooka-Laylee, including young gamers and those who don’t necessarily have a lot of time to pour into video games. In an interview with MCV, managing director and creative lead Gavin Price said that the studio’s main goal was to cater to its core audience who backed the game while also making it accessible to others.
“Even if a young gamer can’t complete an objective in the game, they can just sit and hold the controller and run around with the characters and have fun,” he explained. Although Playtonic has ended up making Yooka-Laylee bigger than it initially planned, you don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to it.
“We’ve always built the game from the ground up with content that can be accessible to someone who isn’t time-rich and who doesn’t have a lot time to spend [playing games],” says Price. “Features such as the co-op and couch multiplayer [are also aimed at] family gamers who are looking for that game where parents can perhaps play it when they’re just around [by themselves].”
Playtonic says that bringing the game to retail was the right course of action because some of the audience it’s trying to capture doesn’t necessarily browse the web for video games or consult gaming websites. Interestingly, the Kickstarter backer demographics reveal that a lot of Yooka-Laylee backers are Nintendo fans but the developer wants to convince PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC players to pick up the game as well.
“We’ll hopefully convince them in the marketing we do that, outside the genres they’re more familiar with, there are game experiences like Yooka-Laylee which [might] look like they’re one type of experience, but when you get hands on, you see some of the challenges in the game are very much attuned to a core gamer’s skill level,” explained Price.
Yooka-Laylee is out on April 11.
