Mojang Publishing Oxeye's Cobalt As First Third-Party Title

Minecraft maker Mojang is leveraging its success developing its own indie games by entering the publishing business, announcing Oxeye Game Studios' Cobalt as its first third-party release. Mojang's Jens Bergensten is part of the Oxeye team working on Cobalt, and Scrolls composer Mattias Haggstrom is working on the game's music, making the project a "very natural" first collaboration, the company said in a statement. "Early on, even as we were founding Mojang, we talked about the idea of collaborating with other indie game studios to release more great games," the company said. "We wanted to find studios who have our philosophy of developing games, which is staying close to the community and treating it as a service." At a Gamelab presentation earlier this year, Mojang's Daniel Kaplan said the company was looking to publish titles from "people with a similar structure [to Mojang]... people who are very passionate about what they're doing." Described as "an action game of running, jumping, rolling, shooting, throwing, dancing, hacking, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, pinata-ing, passing, scoring... and even more rolling," Cobalt will include co-operative and competitive battle modes, as shown in a launch trailer. The Lua-coded Cobalt will come to Windows machines first, followed by promised Macintosh and Linux releases. The game will be shown at Mojang's PAX booth next month.