Motion Twin

Motion Twin is an independent studio specializing in online video games. Founded in 2001, the company is a worker cooperative enterprise based in Bordeaux, France.

Motion Twin
TypePrivate
IndustryVideo games
Founded2001 (2001)
Headquarters
Bordeaux
,
France
ProductsDead Cells
Number of employees
11
Websitemotion-twin.com

History

With the success of Dead Cells into 2019, Motion Twin wanted to move onto their next game while still supporting Dead Cells. However, they still wanted to remain a small cooperative of eight to ten persons, so internally, they created a new development team called Evil Empire around January 2019 to take over the development and support of Dead Cells while the other Motion Twin developers started on their next project.[1][2]

Motion Twin is run as an anarcho-syndicalist workers cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members.[3][4] As part of the legal model, Motion Twin is required to pass a set percentage of its profits to its workers. In August 2019, Motion Twin spun off a new studio, Evil Empire, composed of Dead Cells developers who wanted to continue its development while Motion Twin moved to a new project. Evil Empire is run by Motion Twin's former head of marketing and is not run as a cooperative, particularly because the company wanted to scale beyond ten employees. Motion Twin continues to participate in Dead Cells decisions.[5]

Games

The company initially gained notice through the release of games such as "Hammerfest", "My Brute", "Mush", "Die2Nite", "Alphabounce" and the social game platform, "Twinoid", and now has a community of 15 million registered users. Since the development of Dead Cells, Motion Twin neglected Twinoid with all its games leading to a strong decline of players. As of yet the future of the platform with all its games is unknown, although it has been said that the games will not be updated following Adobe Flash Player's end of life, which was announced for the 1st of January 2021, leading to the likely extinction of the platform.

However, a group of fellow players has decided to save Twinoid's games and created a platform called Eternal-Twin (with Motion Twin's consent), which aims to re-create as many games as possible without using Adobe Flash Player. Thus, those who still want to play after Flash Player's end of life will be able to do so.

All games developed by Motion Twin, with the exception of Dead Cells, can be accessed and played for free with some games including a premium option (subscriptions and items) which create revenue for the company. In 2009, the company had a turnover of 4 million euros.

Products

Nicolas Cannasse, a former developer at Motion Twin has been responsible for the creation of freeware and open source compilers and multimedia technologies, many of which build on the Adobe Flash platform.

His published products include:

  • MTASC - fast ActionScript 2 compiler
  • Haxe - multi-platform language similar to ActionScript 3
  • Neko - language and VM-based runtime

References
  1. Valentine, Rebekah (September 24, 2019). "Dead Cells reaches 2.4m units sold as Motion Twin establishes new label". GamesIndustry.biz. Retrieved September 24, 2019.
  2. Wright, Steven (September 16, 2019). "Too Big to Bail: Why Dead Cells' Creators Built an Evil Empire". Electronic Gaming Monthly. Retrieved September 24, 2019.
  3. Kerr, Chris (July 26, 2018). "Dead Cells dev hopes to challenge exploitation with equal pay model". Gamasutra. Retrieved January 12, 2020.
  4. Grayson, Nathan (July 25, 2018). "Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same". Kotaku. Retrieved January 12, 2020.
  5. Klepek, Patrick (October 30, 2019). "The Ambitious Future of 'Dead Cells' Is Ditching Co-Ops For Capitalism". Vice. Retrieved January 12, 2020.
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