GameTrust Games was the publishing label of GameStop, the video game retailer headquartered in Grapevine, Texas. GameStop announced it on April 18, 2016, and with it the company moved from selling games to helping bring them to market. GameTrust was not built as a traditional big-budget publisher. It ran as a separate vertical inside GameStop, set up as a label for mid-sized developers, and it targeted projects with development budgets of up to $15 million. Every deal was custom-built. Studios kept full rights to their own intellectual property, GameStop took no part in creative decisions, and the money could either get a nearly finished game over the line or start a new one from scratch. The label was led by Mark Stanley, GameStop's VP of Internal Development and Diversification, who had worked in publishing at PlayStation in Latin America. Its launch partners were Insomniac Games, Ready at Dawn, Tequila Works and Frozenbyte, the studios behind Song of the Deep, The Order: 1886, Deadlight and Rime, and the Trine series. The plan called for 5 to 10 games a year, with talks under way with about 20 more developers.
The pitch to those studios was GameStop's reach as a retailer. That meant promotion in its stores, on its website and through the PowerUp Rewards loyalty program and its 44 million members, plus merchandise through sister company ThinkGeek and releases on every major platform, including PSN, Xbox Live and Steam. Two games carry the GameTrust Games name on Steam, and both show what the model was for. Song of the Deep, from Insomniac Games, came out on July 11, 2016. It is a side-scrolling underwater exploration game from a studio best known for big console action. Has-Been Heroes, from Trine developer Frozenbyte, followed on Nintendo Switch on March 28, 2017, a day after it reached Steam. It is a lane-based roguelike that mixes strategy and real-time action, starring a band of aging heroes on one last job: escorting the King's twin princesses to school. Frozenbyte kept building on it. A large free expansion in November 2017, including on Switch, added the Sky Temple region, an Epic Quest mode with the Trine heroes Amadeus, Pontius and Zoya as playable characters, Challenge and Seed modes, more than 120 new spells and more than 150 new items. The GameTrust catalog is small, but it shows a major retailer backing independent studios on their own terms, and Has-Been Heroes is still the clearest example of that idea in action.
