DSFix patch creator Peter "Durante" Thoman launches PC port studio

Peter "Durante" Thoman has announced he's opening a new studio dedicated to PC ports, PH3 Games.

Durante - who has already lent his expertise to PC ports of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel and Rez Infinite - is well-known in the PC modding circuit, and arguably best known for his PC Dark Souls patch. According to a post on Metacouncil forum, the venture's been around since last September, but he's only recently "got the final bureaucratic IDs required to consider it fully complete". It's called PH3 Games so that it's "somewhat pronounceable" in both English and German, and all three co-founders have a PhD. That said, Durante acknowledged the team was "still considering several alternatives".

Specialising "in the engineering aspects of game development", PH3 Games will provide "renowned high-quality ports, as well as consulting related to performance aspects: optimization, parallelization, refactoring and tuning".

Asked how he expected to manage his professional work given, as a hobbyist, he would only typically choose projects that interested him, Durante said: "So when we have to make choices on which projects to take on we can absolutely still decide based on how much they interest us. Of course, there's also a capitalist perspective to it -- hypothetically, if one project were to pay 3 times as much as another but be a bit less interesting we might still chose [sic] it. But so far that certainly hasn't come up, we are still starting out after all."

He also intimated that eventually, he would like to develop his own game.

"Ideas are always floating around, but right now we have great expertise and size to deliver high-quality ports, not so much to create entire games," he said.