Playtonic talks Yooka-Laylee

We sit down with writer Andy Robinson and composer Grant Kirkhope and talk to the pair about the crowdfunding success of the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, and what's in store for players looking forward to getting their hands on Yooka-Laylee.

In other news, Playtonic's game now has a publisher. Team 17 will handle the game and has confirmed plans to release it at retail. They will also assist Playtonic with localisation, QA, marketing and other business matters.

Gavin Price, creative lead and studio head at Playtonic, commented on the deal to MCV, saying:

"Personally I feel it would be a great shame if after our great Kickstarter success, we delivered on our promise of a great game and then it underperformed sales-wise because we didn't have the knowledge, or made a mistake in the way we released or marketed the game.

Thanks to our Kickstarter backers, we're on a really positive trajectory and Team17 is acting like a booster for us on top of that by handling non-game dev tasks."

Team 17's marketing director Debbie Bestwick is also very positive about the deal and says:

"[This partnership] is probably more significant than either Team17 or Playtonic fully realise right now. They are friends of ours and we want to help it make sense for everyone."

Over 80,000 people backed Yooka-Laylee on Kickstarter and it smashed several records and ended up collecting more than £2 million. The game will be released for PC, Playstation 4, Wii U and Xbox One late next year - although we suspect that the Wii U version might be exchanged for NX.