Don't Nod Entertainment SA (trade name: Don't Nod, formerly Dontnod Entertainment) is a French video game developer and publisher based in Paris. Founded in June 2008, it started development on Remember Me (2013). Because of its poor return on investment, Don't Nod entered "judicial reorganisation" in 2013. With the help of French agency funding, it developed Life Is Strange (episodically in 2015), whose successful release raised Don't Nod's industry status. It began third-party publishing with Gerda: A Flame in Winter in 2022.
History
Dontnod Entertainment was founded by Hervé Bonin, Aleksi Briclot, Alain Damasio, Oskar Guilbert and Jean-Maxime Moris on 1 May 2008, alongside other former Criterion Games, Ubisoft and Electronic Arts staff. "Dontnod" is a palindrome devised by co-founder Alain Damasio. Originally based in Quartier des Quinze-Vingts in the 12th arrondissement, the studio moved into a new office in Quartier de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement to accommodate the company's growth in late 2008. The studio used Unreal Engine 3 for their first game, working with Epic Games' engineering team which leading to Epic extending Dontnod's UE3 evaluation and has since used the engine for all of its games.
The developer's debut title was Remember Me, which would at first be a PlayStation 3-exclusive role-playing game, but was dropped by publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2011 on account of cuts in funding. It was presented at Gamescom the same year to attract another publishing deal; the following year, Capcom Europe acquired the rights and reimagined it as an action-adventure game, released in June 2013. In 2013, Dontnod was the most subsidised studio with 600 000€ aid by the French agency Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC). Including aid for a new intellectual property (IP) project codenamed "What if?" (later Life is Strange) for 200 000€. On 28 January 2014, Dontnod filed for redressement judiciaire ("judicial reorganisation"), a form of receivership in France; the proceeding was finalised in February 2018. The proceeding filing was discovered by Factornews and some media outlets like Polygon reported it as Dontnod filing for bankruptcy as a result of the poor sales of Remember Me. Dontnod responded to these reports explaining that they were in the process of "judicial reorganisation" to resize the company and denying bankruptcy. In June 2014, Dontnod announced that they were working with Square Enix Europe on a new game, which was announced as Life Is Strange that year and released in 2015 over the course of five instalments. The critical and commercial success of Life Is Strange caused Dontnod to be solicited by publishers, whereas they previously had to pursue publishers themselves.
Guilbert said in April 2016 that the studio had cast off the ambition of making triple A games and would only see themselves devoted to independent projects, in particular, original, narrative-driven intellectual properties, which narrative director Stéphane Beauverger agreed was "part of Dontnod's DNA". The company's guiding principle is to reinvent itself with every game. For the sake of maintaining the motivation of players and publishers, the production cycle since releasing the five-year commitment Remember Me was reduced to two and a half or three years. "Dontnod Days" are maintained for unsupervised work related to ongoing projects.