Larian: Retail Important To Indie PC Studios

In an interview to be published tomorrow on RPS, Larian boss Swen Vincke argues that digital delivery should not necessarily be seen as the dominant channel for PC games distribution, and argues that retail could be valuable for self-publishing studios such as his: "Nowadays people are all talking about the indie revolution and the power of digital distribution, but retail has always been the powerbase of publishers and remains very important as a sales channel. It is still the dominant sales channel, in fact."

When asked whether retail was still an option for self-publishing on PC he replied: "Of course it is! We did a deal in Germany with a local distributor for the last Divinity game and we sold more than 100,000 units in Germany alone. Convert that into revenue. That's quite a lot of revenue." Larian are intending to self-fund and publish Dragon Commander, after having moved toward self-publishing their previous games and taking more revenue than they would have done with a straight up publisher deal. More tomorrow!