Studio Profile
The Fallen London developer on making failure fun and treating an audience like adults
Fallen London developer Failbetter Games on making failure fun and treating its audience like adults
“IT WAS CLEAR TO US THAT WE HAD SOME FANS OF FAILBETTER, BUT WE HAD MANY MORE FANS OF FALLEN LONDON”
As it approaches its tenth birthday, Failbetter Games is a studio in rude health. Its browser-based free-to-play debut, Fallen London, remains an ongoing concern with a loyal player base almost a decade after launch. It’s about to release its third major game set within that same universe in horror-inflected narrative adventure Sunless Skies. And if CEO and art director Paul Arendt’s Twitter feed is anything to go by, there are plenty still playing and enjoying its predecessor, Sunless
Sea. Not bad for a developer whose stock-intrade is disaster – or tempting its players towards it, at any rate. “The clue is in the name of the company,” Arendt tells us. “Failure’s fun. Spiralling catastrophe is kind of our thing.”
In many ways, Failbetter’s output so far has been the antithesis of the traditional power fantasy. “Empowerment is, well, it’s everywhere in games, isn’t it,” Arendt continues. “Fantasies of success and fulfilment. Yeah, we have a bit of that, but I think a lot of our games are fantasies of failure. And of vicarious horribleness. Of starvation and cannibalism and making terrible pacts with the old gods and so on.”
For all that it might be cruel to its players once they’ve hit start, Failbetter is incredibly considerate of them otherwise; indeed, its openness and willingness to listen to its community is one of the secrets behind its success. Back in 2009 when the company was founded, it was just two people: Arendt and Alexis Kennedy. The pair launched Fallen London, originally known as Echo Bazaar, the same year. This vision of an alternative Victorian London, a heady combination of gothic prose and Lovecraftian horror, began to attract a cult audience who revelled in this strange world and its dark, witty writing. “It’s generally a louche place to be,” Arendt says, attempting to sum up its appeal. “Right from the start it was much more relaxed than real Victorian society, because you, the player, were just brilliant at everything. You could become a burglar or a detective or you could just wander around collecting pets. It’s basically a Choose Your Own Adventure model with a buttery RPG sauce layered on top.”
During its first three months, the game was completely free to play. Thereafter, it was monetised by limiting action points, allowing players to experience the narrative in piecemeal fashion without spending a penny, or to pay small amounts to replenish their points and continue the story. In 2011, it introduced a cheap subscription model for ‘exceptional friends’, which allowed the game’s growing fanbase to expand their daily actions. By that time, Kennedy and Arendt had invited several other writers to contribute to a world that boasted four novels’ worth of words – now, of course, it’s quite some way beyond that – and an increasingly labyrinthine lore.
Throughout that time, Arendt says, the studio had been regularly communicating with its “very active, very lovely, very opinionated” userbase, using a particularly ingenious method to survey its players. Failbetter had opted for a diegetic approach, sending street urchins to approach player-characters to request feedback. “People like to roleplay characters but in quite a knowing, ironic way. So addressing them as the developer within the world just felt like a natural option,“Arendt says. “And they were generally charmed rather than irritated by this.”
In 2012, news arrived of a standalone prequel expansion. If it didn’t know already, Failbetter was about to get a demonstration of its community’s enthusiasm for more Fallen London. Within seven hours of its Kickstarter campaign going live, The Silver Tree had breezed past its $10,000 target, eventually topping more than four times that amount. Later that same year, Failbetter launched a second crowdfunding drive, this time for a completely new project, cardbased RPG Below (not to be confused with Capy’s similarly named dungeon-crawler). It fell well short of its goal. “It was clear to us that we had some fans of Failbetter, but we had many
more fans of Fallen London,” narrative director Chris Gardiner says. “This is common to fandom, I think – you do get people who are fans of creators, but more commonly you get fans of worlds or characters or stories.”
As such, when it returned to the well in late 2013, it did so with a more pragmatic idea. Once again, the urchin knocked on the doors of
Fallen London’s players, but this time the pitch was much more appealing. “I think we said, ‘A 2D Elite with steamships’,” Arendt laughs. But, crucially, this was to take place in the underground ocean, or Unterzee, that surrounds the world of Fallen London. “We wanted to go for broke and make a proper PC game incorporating this universe, and also incorporating something we felt really strongly about, which is that reading in games is underrated and an incredible atmosphere builder,” he says.
This time, Failbetter was asking for much more than the $10,000 goal it had set for The Silver
Tree, albeit for a much more ambitious game. Still, if there was any anxiety at the studio about hitting the £60,000 target, it was quickly dispelled. By the end of its campaign, Sunless Sea had reached £100,000 – enough for a further expansion, Zubmariner. “It was almost too good to be true. Obviously back then Kickstarter was very new, and we hit the crest of the wave with it,” Arendt says. But if anything, it was its later success during its spell in Early Access that made a bigger difference to the game. “It wasn’t only peak optimism for Kickstarter, it was peak optimism for Early Access as well,” Gardiner adds, acknowledging that it had launched at just about the perfect time. “We wanted to hear from people while we were making it, to see if we
were heading in the right direction,” Arendt says. “I think on the whole that was really fruitful. We may have spent longer in Early Access than we planned to, but that’s normal.”
Still, it wasn’t exactly plain sailing, particularly when it came to the final stretch goal. Zubmariner was no ordinary expansion, but rather conceived as “Sunless Sea, but under the water,” as Arendt puts it. Instead of simply building an additional region, Failbetter essentially had to remake the game from a new perspective. “I won’t lie, it was hard,” he says. “But it worked out in the end. And I think our audience really appreciates [us going] the extra mile.” So while it took longer than anticipated, the result was transformative. “To the point where it pains us now if we see someone playing Sunless Sea without the expansion. It’s like, ‘Ugh no, don’t!'” Gardiner laughs.
Zubmariner was in its final stages of development when Failbetter lost one of its helmsmen. Alexis Kennedy left in June 2016 to found Weather Factory (most recently responsible for Cultist Simulator, another Kickstarter success) though by then, Failbetter had grown to 15 fulltime staff, which softened the blow. “He wanted to go off and do other stuff,” Arendt says, “And he’s often done his own thing. But the timing of that was such that we were ready to move on. We were just finishing off Zubmariner, so in some ways it was a clean break. We sat down and said, ‘Okay, what next?’”
By then, Failbetter had welcomed an important new crew member on board, another sign of the studio’s bond with its community. When Sunless Sea’s Kickstarter launched, editor
Olivia Wood was a fan; before development of Zubmariner concluded, she was among the fulltime staff. “I was one of the first people to actually back Sunless Sea, partly because I missed out on The Silver Tree Kickstarter,” she says. “I was hovering over the button and I clicked the second it went live, and went, ‘What? I’m number nine?!’ It was almost like we were fighting each other to get in there first, which is just ludicrous.”
Wood’s experience as an editor (her specialism in sci-fi and fantasy has seen her work with the likes of Terry Pratchett and Sarah Pinborough) had already led her to approach Failbetter with feedback. “Ages before Sunless
Sea I’d sent in loads of support tickets, and when I joined the company I was quite embarrassed by how many I’d sent,” she laughs. The studio trialled her on a freelance basis, and gave her some of the work that had been submitted by
Sunless Sea’s various contributing writers. On her first day she produced nine pages of notes on a single freelancer’s work. “At which point, they said ‘Oh god, we do need an editor!’”
Using writers outside its internal team has benefits for games like Sunless Sea and Skies, with a range of voices giving each of the islands and ports a distinctive flavour, but it has its downsides, too. “It’s just not reasonable to expect a freelancer to be completely on top of ten years of incredibly fiddly lore. And that’s our responsibility,” Gardiner says. Indeed, part of Wood’s job is to ensure that everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet, especially when it comes to its world’s more fantastical elements. “One of the hardest things to convey is exactly what kind of weird fits and what doesn’t,” Wood says. “Chris has a bunch of guidelines that we share with freelancers, which is how to make your writing weird without making it too far-fetched. Sometimes people go a little bit too Cthulhu, or a little bit too magic fantasy. But as soon as we’ve reined them in and they’ve ‘got’ the weird, most writers seem to be able to run with it.”
“I think we probably have more of an editing process than many studios twice our size or even five times our size,” Arendt adds, and it’s not just Failbetter that has benefitted. In 2017, Wood was recognised as one of BAFTA’s Breakthrough Brits, an acknowledgement for which she credits her employer’s support. “It’s the kind of thing that boosts your career and profile and means people are more likely to poach you, but they had no qualms about it. It was just really reassuring and lovely to know that people actually give that much of a shit about your work.”
While Failbetter may put Fallen London’s inhabitants through a variety of horrible hardships, it’s clear the studio cares deeply about its staff, adopting a vehemently anti-crunch policy. “The nearest thing I think we’ve got to a mission statement is that we try and treat people like grown-ups,” Arendt says – and that’s true of its players, too. “We like to leave a gap where you can insert your own interpretation,” Wood says. “It’s not that we’re not telling you the story. It’s a deliberate creative space we’ve built for you to exist in.” And should that happen to lead to the kind of spiralling catastrophe of which the developer is so fond? “Well, then you can revel in this utter shitshow trash fire you’ve managed to engineer for yourself,” Gardiner laughs.
“IT PAINS US NOW IF WE SEE SOMEONE PLAYING SUNLESS SEA WITHOUT THE EXPANSION. IT’S LIKE, ‘UGH, DON’T!”