Copy and pasted from NeoGaf

The conversation then moved on to ThatGameCompany’s financing after moving on from the Sony partnership. “We’ve made three games and have completed the contract. ]So from this point on, we’ve raised venture capital because we wanted to own IP and put it on any platform we want.” Leaving the shelter of any large publisher’s wing is no easy transition, but here it’s a move that also offers new opportunities for ThatGameCompany.

He said: “A while back someone was asking me what I was looking for and I said ‘I wanted to have an input device that captures the player’s facial expressions and gestures and fingers’ I think the Kinect 2 is finally there.”

Instead Chen talked about a trajectory of ideas and experiences through his games, Cloud, Flow, Flower and Journey. “The next game after Journey is like, ok we’ve done it with strangers on the internet, can this also happen among people who know each other. It’s a natural evolution of everything we are doing.”

Taking the magical encounter between unidentified strangers in Journey and bringing it to bear on friends in the same place is not an obvious next step, but an enticing one. This ambition focuses on creating emotion -- as Flower did for an individual and Journey did online the next game will attempt to do locally.

“Our goal is always to make games that can move people, that are designed for everybody so the whole family should be able to play it together and that bring people together and really move them in a way. It feels like the history of the studio and everything we do is slowly heading towards that direction.”

However, the transition after the Sony contract hasn’t all been smooth sailing. “When we finished Journey in January 2012 we hadn’t figured out where the money was coming for the next game or if Journey was going to make money. So we had to let everybody go. Only the founders were left.”

Happily, ThatGameCompany seems to have now weathered the storm and be headed towards its next game. “There are four key founders and Kellee [Santiago] is one of the founders who left, the three other founders continued ThatGameCompany. Once we gained money we hired people back, right now we are 14 people and still growing.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/10152821/Life-After-Journey-for-ThatGameCompany.html

Only time will tell,if this was the right move. They should be able to pull in more revenue though,depending on what there next game is.

I truly hope they make it, all of their games are incredible experiences - I just hope those venture capitalists have as much understanding as Sony had when they wanted to prolong game design for another year or so.

Lol i almost forgot how small they were

Looks like some people left too soon lol. It's nice to see that they rehired people though

This pretty much confirms that PSN,was never able to "boom" like it should have. Sony made PSN on ps3 better with time but it was too late to change certain things

I'm glad to know that PS4 will have a competent online network from jump. The whole PSN network should be booming more this time around

Benchmark Capital is much, much more understanding than Sony was (although we were funded by Sony in order to make very risky, creative games).

You should stop worrying about TGC.  It's like worrying if the next Call of Duty game will make more or less than $1B in sales.  CoD and TGC will both do extremely well, but it's unknown exactly how well it will do.

Microsoft could throw money their way to make an exclusive Kinect enabled title. TGC seems to be interested in it.

Either way, I hope they succeed and become a successful 3rd party developer.

We're not interested in making exclusive titles.  We already have $5.5 Million in funding from Benchmark Capital to make our next game.

Microsoft *could* pay us for the next game to be exclusive to the Xbox One on consoles, but we'd need to have the option open to make games on iOS, Android, PC, portable consoles, and whatever else that comes out that's not a set-top-box console.

Seems like they really wanted out from Sonys hands. I will keep an eye for what they create on xbox one.

We wanted out of console exclusivity.  Sony was great, but it's tough to make games that only a small fraction of the gaming community can enjoy.

As for the Xbox One, we have not announced if or if not our next title will be on the console.  Microsoft would also have to change their rules on self-publishing or bend their rules to allow just us to self-publish on their console.  (This isn't to say that we haven't already struck up a deal, though.)

I've played Flow, Flower and Journey, and enjoyed them immensely. I like games that let you explore, including open world games like Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim, but all the hacking and killing gets old. Is it really the only way to play a game these days? It's good to have a mix of game genres to play, platformers, puzzles, and TGC games which I think of as 'emotional' games, to get away from all that violence. Having said that, I need to get back to TLOU, survival mode....i'm stuck in the museum with no molotovs!