dtp entertainment

» see dtp-entertainment.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Thomas Baur started DTP Neue Medien in Hamburg in 1995, publishing multimedia software under borrowed German media brands, Hörzu Software and Focus among them. That is a business that exists only while a country is large enough to want its own version of everything on CD-ROM. In 1999 the company became dtp entertainment AG and moved into games, and the dtp in the name turned out to stand for digital tainment pool, which tells you roughly which year it was named.

What dtp did for the next thirteen years was act as the German-language funnel. It localized and shipped other people's games into German retail, and then it started commissioning its own. The joint label with Egmont Interactive, Shoebox, announced in March 2001, released Gothic on the fifteenth of that month, developed by Piranha Bytes, at the time a Bochum subsidiary of Phenomedia working on its first game. Egmont walked away from the games business entirely that September, and dtp kept the label.

The commissioning half peaked in 2008, when Radon Labs delivered Das Schwarze Auge: Drakensang and it sold over 200,000 copies, and dtp bought the Bremen studio House of Tales in the same year. By 2010 it was reporting 26.8 million euros of revenue with about 140 people. That is a serious German publisher, and it is also the high-water mark.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the labels ~

dtp ran its catalog through names rather than through one brand. Shoebox came from the Egmont partnership and survived it. Anaconda was spun up at the end of 2005 for adventure games and dropped again in 2008. Pferd & Pony took it into children's software in 2001, which worked well enough that a sister company, dtp young entertainment, was set up in 2004 and then separated from the group by Baur in 2007. That separation mattered later. When the AG went down, Baur had to tell Golem that the children's company had been legally detached back in 2007 and was no part of the insolvency.

It bought studios too. 4Head Studios in Hannover became Cranberry Production in 2007, and the same year dtp founded RealU in Singapore to chase online games. Cranberry was moved from Hannover to Hamburg in early 2012, which in hindsight reads like a cost measure a few months too late.

~ the filing ~

On 27 April 2012 the company filed for insolvency at the Amtsgericht Hamburg under case number 67b IN 130/12, with Dr. Tjark Thies appointed as preliminary administrator. Golem reported it two days later and noted that dtp's own website still claimed 110 employees in Hamburg, a figure it had not updated since October 2010. Nobody gave a reason, then or since. It was structured as a Planinsolvenz, which is the version you file when you still think there is a company worth rescuing.

There was not. On 3 July the court published the administrator's finding of Masseunzulänglichkeit, meaning the estate could not cover even the costs of the proceedings, and on 9 July the company was dissolved. Somewhere in those ten weeks the unfinished slate stopped being anyone's problem. Memento Mori 2 and a Sherlock Holmes adventure were on it, and so was Ronimo's Awesomenauts, whose developers told the press they had no idea what the filing meant for their launch.

~ who got the pieces ~

The German studios dtp had collected mostly did not outlive it, and the catalog went where catalogs go. Several of the adventure licenses, The Mystery of the Druids among them, were picked up afterward by Nordic Games, the Swedish publisher that spent those years buying orphaned European rights by the armful.

I never bought a dtp box, because the German-language publisher of a game is invisible from outside German-language retail. The route into Turkey was through whoever held the rest of Europe, so Drakensang arrived as a Radon Labs game and Runaway as a Spanish one. The name on the spine in Hamburg was a different name from the one on the spine anywhere else.

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