Worms Developer Team 17 Makes Moves In Digital Publishing

Team 17, a UK development studio best known for its work on the Worms and Alien Breed franchises, has announced that it plans to turn its attention away from the physical media market and focus on digital distribution in the future. In an interview with UK trade site MCV, co-founder Martyn Brown said, “Digital distribution has allowed easy and direct access to the game for millions of customers at a time when it has become difficult to get attention at retail ... we have no ambitions to return to retail publishing.” Brown also said that Team 17 would be actively working with indie developers to bring its games to PSN, XBLA, the App Store and other digital distribution markets. “I think that given the general malaise of the third party publisher ‘work-for-hire’ market, it is no surprise that a lot of developers are heading towards digital publishing as some kind of savior," Brown commented. Team 17's management team has been restructured to accompany the transition to full digital distribution, with Martyn Brown acting as business development director and Debbie Bestwick handling both managing director and sales and marketing director positions. Mark Baldwin also steps into the role of community manager, and Paul Kilburn and John Dennis will work as head of production and head of design respectively. Team 17 was founded in 1990 and launched the long-running Worms series in 1995. Its most recent release was Worms Reloaded, released for Steam in July 2010.