AHEAD OF THE CURVE
When CEO Dominic Wheatley joined the firm in 2016, his plan was to grow Curve Digital into one of the UK’s biggest videogame publishers. “Over the years, the industry has been dominated by those people who managed to clamber up the slippery slope,” he tells us. “And the reason was that the capital required was so enormous. It required 200 million pounds of capital just to be able to deal with warehouse inventory coming in and out from Sony, Xbox and so on. And so we saw a dearth of British games publishers.”
Initially, Curve ported popular PC games to consoles. With the rise of Steam and the digital market, and the declining visibility of indies, came an opportunity to provide a platform, with the warehouse costs gone. Hits such as Human Fall Flat convinced Wheatley that this was the way to go. Investing in The Ascent
was “the next step” for Curve, and the scale of the operation is “now in the millions.”
Next-gen will do that for you. In regular conversations with platform holders, The Ascent
caught Microsoft’s eye. “This was before we knew about the new machine. Initially we were talking about a general exclusive. And then they said, ‘Actually, there’s a whole new thing, and we’re going to give you some dev kits to give to Neon Giant, because we’ve got some extra things we want to feature.’” He can’t help but compare the experience to his time at Eidos publishing Tomb Raider: “Software sells hardware, and there’s no doubt Sony sold more PlayStations that Christmas. Now, I’m not suggesting we’re going to be Tomb Raider with The Ascent, but I think it’s one of a number of titles that will separate [Xbox] from other formats.”
For Curve, hitching its wagon to a next-gen launch title is huge. “It’s a bit like Leicester City winning the cup,” Wheatley laughs. “It propels you to a new level. It commands attention with the platform owners. And, at the end of the day, one’s rather hoping that one’s going to make quite a lot of money out of it. And the reason for that is, if you do, then you can start to put some of that money back into backing more games with more independent developers.” Digital releases are absolving publishers of inventory costs, and time spent pursuing deals with physical wholesalers, that can be instead invested straight into the games. “And hopefully, you can sort of get there a bit quicker. In the old days, you had to really sort of clamber up there. I think now, there’s nothing to stop you.”
The digital distribution pipeline is only going to improve, he says, with the advent of next-gen: Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Stadia, and so on. He’s confident that Curve is in the right position to take advantage of it without the baggage of a legacy – much as King and Zynga saw the mobile gaming opportunity at the start of the last decade. “In the end, the big companies, all they could do is watch as the billions of dollars went straight past them. And I think we’ll see something similar. I hope in this push, you get the new winners who can’t be pushed to one side, and I’m hoping companies such as Team 17 and Curve will be those people.”