Earlier this year, Piece by Piece launched on Steam. Then another game, also called Piece by Piece, launched on Steam. Now they’re launching together on the Switch under the same publishing label, because sometimes video games and the people who make them are good.
Despite sharing a name, the two games are vastly different. The Piece by Piece developed by Gamekat and published by No More Robots is a cozy life sim in which a fox tinkerer pieces the broken treasures of his neighbors back together. The other Piece by Piece, developed and published by Neon Polygons, is a game that makes puzzle platforming literal as you piece levels together, jigsaw style. The teams behind the two games became aware of each other after they each announced their release dates.
“Back when we announced the Steam launch date for our Piece by Piece in March, a day later the Piece by Piece from Neon Polygons also announced their launch date, and it was two days after ours,” said Mike Rose, co-founder of No More Robots. He said he got a nervous email from Neon Polygons, concerned that No More Robots would go after them for having a game of the same name. “I got back to them and said ‘Well, that’s just hilarious. Do you wanna bundle up on Steam?’”
In an ecosystem in which developers are desperate for every competitive advantage they can find to stand out amidst the ocean of new games launching daily and devs are taking down demos of their games in fear of AI clones muddying the waters, it’s heartening to see this kind of collaboration. When Rose found out Neon Polygons wanted to port their game to the Switch but couldn’t due to time and financial constraints, he offered to help them out with that too.
“I did it partially because it was a nice / fun thing to do, but I also kinda did it because I love chaos.”
Chaos that continued during the porting process because it turns out Nintendo has a hard time understanding “doing it for the bit.”
“We had to explain over and over again, to each separate Nintendo organization (Europe, Japan, America), that ‘No, sorry but those are two separate games. Yes, they have the same name. Yes, they have the same release date. Yes, we are very sorry. We promise we won’t do this again,’” Rose said.
Piece by Piece and Piece by Piece will launch together on the Switch November 25th.