Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson on the reasoning ning behind signing with 505 Games mes
You probably missed it in the endless churn of the videogame news cycle (more on that later) but Typhoon recently announced that we have signed with the lovely people at 505 Games to publish our first game. This is monstrously huge news for us, and while probably not that interesting for most, it prompted more than a few questions from friends in the development community.
Most prominent amongst them was why we would sign with a publisher at all. Why not just self-publish? Doesn’t a publisher just take a percentage of your income in the new world of self-publishing and online distribution? Couldn’t you just eat ramen noodles, move back in with your parents and make a game without any interference at all? What could a publisher offer you that you couldn’t do yourself?
The short answer to that final question, at least from our position, is quite a lot. As I’ve mentioned here before, many of us have kids now, and we can’t realistically boot-strap the entire game ourselves. Especially not the kind of game we want to make, which is halfway between a lo-fi indie and a big triple-A game. So while we are paying for about a third of the overall budget, we either needed to find a partner to come in for the rest, or to radically downscope the kind of game we’re making. That didn’t match either our ambitions or the kind of staff we have, who are much better at solving the problems of a juicy 3D open world than a 2D platformer.
In addition, partnering with 505 gives us access to a bunch of secondary services which we didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with ourselves. They will help with localisation, testing at scale and global distribution, all of which are basically impossible at our size unless we tackle everything linearly. We could potentially launch on PC, then expand to console, but the data we’ve seen makes it look like you leave a lot of sales on the table if you follow that path, so we’d prefer to let people get the game on whichever platform they want.
It also allows us to (hopefully) get a lot more visibility by being available in more languages, and therefore territories, as well as more platforms. We know that our biggest obstacle, apart from the obvious need to make a good game, will be to rise above the noise and become a title that people even know exists: we’ve watched friends launch games that completely disappeared despite critical success. Our publisher has relationships with press, retailers and distributors which, combined with our own contacts, can hopefully help us increase our chances of being noticed.
The publisher role is evolving, too. Everincreasing budgets have killed the worst of the crop unless they could pivot to quality instead of just pumping out mediocre licensed titles, and the realisation that good teams are hard to find has meant that it feels more like a partnership than before. Gone are the days of the external producer on the phone rattling off a list of changes and requests while threatening to withhold your payment.
While there are still some heavy hitters trying to cover a slate of games in every genre, the new breed of publishers are smaller, boutique labels with a much tighter focus. Look at the intense retro flavours published by Devolver or the art-nouveau, messagefocused offerings from Annapurna. I think this is a fantastic evolution for the business, but it means that finding a partner who is actually aligned with the goals of your game is crucial, or they’ll always be pushing you in a direction in which you don’t want to travel.
When I joined Ubisoft, it was because they’d figured out how to make the jump from distributor and licensed-game maker to quality developer. I remember standing in another designer’s office at Maxis while working on a Sims game when he asked me if I’d seen the new Prince Of Persia. I had not. But I looked. And it was glorious. I asked who made it and he said Ubisoft Montreal – the same company and studio that had made the recent Splinter Cell. I was impressed, and a few years later I made sure I was working there.
It feels to me like 505 is trying to make the same jump. They’ve signed Bloodstained, from Castlevania’s Koji Igarashi, as well as
Underworld Ascendant from some of the old Ultima guys. I found myself preordering their games, so it feels as if our tastes are aligned. And if we can be part of a group of titles that are not only interesting individually, but part of the crop that propels our publisher to the next step, then we are perfectly positioned for our second game when the time comes.
We’ve watched friends launch games that completely disappeared despite critical success