Q-Games: 'Q is jumping ship' is nonsense

Q-Games has defended its decision to release its next title, 1-6, via Steam rather than the PlayStation Store where the rest of its PixelJunk back catalogue can be found.

“People quickly jump to the conclusion that we're jumping ship from PSN but we're simply a very experimental company," Q-Games president Dylan Cuthbert told Eurogamer, pointing out that there'd actually been a Facebook version of PixelJunk Monsters for some time.

“And for the slightly different development/publication approach we wanted to try and take for 1-6 Steam seemed most appropriate. Given our history with Sony I think people are being rather hasty in thinking 'Q is jumping ship' or other such nonsense.”

Lead designer Rowan Parker added that Steam offered the ability to iterate quickly.

“Steam gives us the freedom to open up our development process and be completely transparent approaching release,” he explained.

“We also want to rapidly iterate on the game following release, and Steam is probably the best platform around for this at the moment. Steam also has some interesting features we want to explore like the new 'big picture mode'. I'm also particularly interested to hear how their recent Linux Beta is going."

The team plans to release PixelJunk 1-6 in 2013, with Parker adding “I hope 1-6 does well enough on Steam for PC that we can bring it to PSN and as many other platforms as is technically possible!"

Q-Games is based in Japan and made a name for itself with its PixelJunk series on PSN, which included Racers and Eden.