A 'game about giving' will be thatgamecompany's next potential hit

By Jon Martindale November 2, 2016

thatgamecompany giving game thatgamecompany01 — thatgamecompany

That game company, you know the one, thatgamecompany, has announced that it’s working on a brand new game. Details remain sparce at this time, but we do have a few marketing images and a statement that it’s “about giving.” What that means is anyone’s guess, but considering this developer’s past work, it will no doubt be unique.

For the uninitiated, “thatgamecompany” created meditative gaming experiences like Flow, Flower and Journey, so the fact that its new game doesn’t sound like anything another developer would make is hardly surprising.

Beside that it’s “about giving,” we’re told that the upcoming game “is a very ambitious project to positively touch more players than ever before.” We’re told it uses new technology and builds on everything the developer learned on previous titles. It’s being funded internally, so it will be self-published and therefore not subject to the whims of external publishers.

Related: PlayStation Plus members get ‘Journey,’ ‘Badland,’ more for free in September

The images released alongside these statements don’t tell us much more. There’s a stylized image of a pair of candles — one lighting the other — as well as some children wearing Journey-like shawls. A third image is in full color and looks like it would be at home in previous thatgamecompany release Flower. It features a grassy hilltop, with a portal of some kind and an eye-catching lens flare, seemingly linked with another such flare in a cloud.

That is of course is not a lot to go on, but then thatgamecompany releases aren’t necessarily designed to have overt themes. They’re designed in a broad-strokes, contemplative fashion.

If that’s the kind of game you want to play, you’ll have to wait until sometime in 2017 to get your hands on it, but if you’re interested in helping making games like that, thatgamecompany is hiring right now. Specifically it’s looking for a networking engineer, senior technical gameplay engineer, and a more ambiguously described “feel engineer.”

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