It's approaching two years since THQ Nordic acquired Koch Media and its Deep Silver publishing label for $150 million. …
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Despite being in development even longer, there's still no sign of another important Koch release: Dead Island 2. The game was originally being worked on by the series' creators at Techland, before that team moved onto Dying Light. It passed to Yager Developments in 2012, to Sumo Digital in 2016, and earlier this year to Dambuster Studios, the Koch-owned developer staffed by former Free Radical and Crytek employees.
Has such a tumultuous history, and the inherent delays, damaged expectations for Dead Island 2 at all?
"My favourite question," Kundratitz laughs. "Look, Dead Island is a very important brand for us and we've got to get it right. It's just a testimony of our dedication to get it right.
"It's a great story to tell everyone that it's on its third studio, but we like to be judged on the end result and we're really confident that when it comes out it's going to be a kick-ass zombie game. We'll certainly give it all our power."
Despite the split over the original iteration of Dead Island 2, Koch still retains close ties with Techland -- in fact, it's distributing Dying Light 2 when it launches next year. But Kundratitz insists there's no conflict of interest here.
"It would be conflict if we were launching on top of each other," he acknowledges. "But that's not going to be a problem.