- Everyone's got a story to tell. Everyone's got a great idea. Experiment, you know and if
you and a few people are finding this game really fun, then I'm sure, like Chris says, that that niche audience will be there.
- We founded the company way back in 2008 and how I got into that, I guess from my graduate course I was doing web design.
And way back then there was kind of a thing called Flash and I was making a lot of Flash games for advertising companies for if
someone wanted to create their brand a little game you could play online, as part of the
the sales pitch. So doing that I was also with my business partner Luke, he was also in a similar
career, making these flash games and we just, you know, we enjoyed
doing this but we wanted to strike out on our own. So we carried on
making games for clients but in the background we were kind of making our own
game. And even at that time, we were making it not sure what we were going to do with it.
But we just felt like it would be really like, we wanted to make games slightly differently. A lot
of our games have hand crafted elements. And then so while making these client based games we made
a game called Lume, which was all made by paper and craft with an animated character running
around. We filmed it in a friend's bedroom really really low budget, really low scale and when we did
that we then decided to let's just put it on Steam and see what happens. Back then Steam you know
only had a handful of indie games and we were lucky enough around that like 2010, 2011 kind of
first independent game companies to be in that bunch. And so Lume went on to kind of pay for
itself and more and gave us this independence that we didn't know we could do. We could make a game
in this small studio and we can we can launch it. - I started in the industry back in '96.
I'd always wanted to work in games so I managed to land a job in a what we would now call it a
little indie company straight out of university and that gave me a leg up to get a job at
EA for a couple of years. I worked at Intelligent Games and then around about
the millennium I settled down at Traveller's Tales just before they released the first LEGO Star Wars.
So over the next 15 years or so, I worked on most of the LEGO series up until the point where we
finally did LEGO Dimensions. I spent a lot of time working on the Doctor Who elements of
LEGO Dimensions. And then I felt I'd peaked so set up uh my company, Quantum Soup Studios
in 2016 and t's been an interesting experience, a little bit rocky. My original
game I couldn't manage to find a publisher for so we had to pivot to do a bit of work for hire.
And then our current project which I'm gonna have to be cagey about because it's
unannounced, our current project is a licensed game that I did manage to get a publisher for.
So it's been a little bit of a windy road to where we are today but we're currently working
on a licensed game with a big IP for families which I'm very excited about.
- What do you think were the benefits of striking out and starting on your own? What was the difference between
working for your own studio and working for another agency, like TT or EA?
- Yeah it's swings and roundabouts. There are pros and cons. My lead at TT had run a company for
a while and unfortunately it had, through no fault of his, it had failed.
I'd never experienced that so I'd only had that laser focus and I was keen to have a chance to make
more creative decisions. So I was quite excited to be able to go like right this is the
thing that I want to do. That also was a bit of a learning experience because the first
thing that I wanted to do was a bit quirky and a bit too ambitious and as a result
I couldn't land a deal for that one. So I had to um pivot and
do things differently for a little bit. And that was a little bit of a difficult
time because you know, it made me question some of my decisions. But I feel like I was able to
turn it around, so this this project feels like it's a much better bet commercially
than that original one. I want to go back to that original one because I still think that
it's got legs but it's something that I think that I'm probably going to have to put some of my own
money into rather than trying to pitch it to somebody else.
- The benefits were again, and Chris has sort of touched on this, the creative freedom you have with creating your own
project. And, you know, whatever happens it's on you. I mean it's tough and I always
think the beginning of the game process is very exciting and you think-- But getting a game over the
line and published and you know you've got scheduling issues, HR issues, you've got
is this even a good idea anymore issues, you know, that's really tough. And it's very...
it can be very stressful and you always need to kind of make sure you're looking after
yourself and your team. And you know, yeah that's really tough. We self-publish as
well so we're not even relying on a publisher for our games. I mean that that kind of freedom
and I think with the knowledge and the, you know, doing it 15 years we kind of... we hope we know how
to make a State of Play game and how to get it done. So it's really exciting that
kind of hey I want to tell a story and I want an audience to see it. So yeah that was a real benefit for us.
- I'm going to start with Chris on this and if it's not too brutal a question
you know, what does it cost to set up on your own? Do you need a savings pot? Do you think you have
to have a day job? I'm sure you don't because you didn't. - I think one of the mistakes that I made was
I was a little bit too ambitious early on. I was targeting sort of like projects that would
have a budget of about half a mil and that sits in a weird no man's land between micro indie
games where publishers are quite happy to throw sort of like 50 grand or 100 grand at, like
a solo developer who's got a really cool quirky project, because that's pocket change to them.
But once you get up to the like half a mil to a mill that gets into the range where
it's still a cheap project in the scheme of things, it sounds like a lot,
it goes in no time. They're not really interested until you get up to
the sort of like six to ten million budget where you then need sort of like a big
team and that's complicated. I tried to sort of go into that middle of
that no man's land because I didn't really have a lot of experience with project budgets.
That felt like it would be a comfortable sort of like team size and budget size
for me at the time. But it didn't really fit with what publishers were looking for and also it
carried a bit of a risk because I was trying to go from full-time employment to
full-time employment and I needed to have some sort of budget in place. I think it's probably
smarter to do it the way that Katherine has done it, which is like starting with something that was
a working business first and then transitioning into into something
more creative gradually without taking such a big risk. I don't know if you agree with that Kath.
- I don't know. I don't know if we've done it the right way. You'll have to tell us but but yeah I mean again
like I mentioned before, I guess generally as a company we've been quite risk averse and
quite early on I've got an excellent mentor in the industry who's a veteran games
developer and he just turned to me and went keep your overheads low. And it's probably the best
piece of advice someone's ever given me because basically yeah each project we you know.... with teams
of two, if that goes well with team of four. So we've scaled up in a very
manageable way and we haven't relied on publishing money. It's been our own money but
then again the profits have all been our own money. So yeah we've really scaled up
that way and it it seems to work for us. - It actually leads us on quite nicely to the
next section which is about investors. I think that's an area that lots of budding developers
feel that there's quite a lot of information about investing out there. So if you google how
to find investment you'll be in inundated with with helpful articles. But it's also a
bit of a mystery because we all know that these things are quite often fortuitous,
it's quite often to do with connections, it's quite often to do with someone you may have bumped
in with, to someone at GDC or something. Did you set up a vertical slice of your game and then take that round?
We've worked a lot with with platforms such as Apple
and again, when we're sort of showing them the next game, we've done things like vertical
slice of the game and a pitch. And so that's probably how we get them interested in the game.
Showing as much as you can is always great but again, don't invest a year of your time into a
game that you're then gonna pitch. It's sort of getting the balance right
about giving enough to get people interested but obviously you don't want to be working for free
for years on a game hoping to get some investment. - Once I started pitching games, I did find that
the fact that I got like 20 years of experience in the industry didn't really count for very much
in the context of pitching a particular game. It was all about okay so what's the game,
who's it for, have you got a demo that we can play. That is all they're interested in.
I suspect that sort of like my background did help kind of gloss over a bunch of
questions that they might have asked a less experienced developer but it certainly
didn't just magically open the door sort of like oh okay you know what you're
doing then, great have some money which is kind of what I was hoping for. And that very much did
not happen. So you have to show what you want to make. Vertical slices
and just demos in general are a bit of a pain but it is so useful to
build something like that so that you can show it to people and get feedback on it.
It is very satisfying to have people play your demo and go like yes,
I would definitely buy that game, when's it done? It's like when somebody will pay us to finish it.
- The next question I'd like to ask you about is marketing and finding an audience.
Gaming is an exceptionally competitive and in some instances, and I say this with love, over
saturated markets particularly for certain games in certain sub-genres. So I'd love to know how...
Do you start with an audience, an ideal audience and work your way backwards?
Do you start with the game idea and then try and hope you find an audience? How do you go about that?
- I guess for us, we kind of start with the idea first. I mean, I'd like to think
we're never just kind of making it in a vacuum of like this is a game we want to make you know,
don't care if anyone likes it. Obviously you're always trying to make a game that there is an
audience for. But I think a really good tip is to be authentic to yourself and
if you are just kind of playing a numbers game of like well 18 to 24 year olds like these so we need--
you know, it's gonna come out in the end result and you're not gonna enjoy making it either.
A game takes a long time to make and you know, make sure it's something you want to wake
up every morning to and make it. The biggest marketing tool for us if I'm being
really honest is awards and especially the BAFTA we won from Lumino City. We got that
before it launched on IOS. So it was on PC, won a BAFTA and two months later came out on IOS.
So straight away it was a BAFTA award-winning game you know. IT kind of told its own story
which we were incredibly grateful for. So for people starting out, I really recommend
if you feel like your game's good, it's always worth a shot at just entering.
I'm interested in making games. I have no particular sort of skill at selling them.
So my plan has always been to work with a publisher who knows what they're doing.
The publishers have the budget and the knowledge to get
a given project in front of the audience who will be interested in it. What Katherine says
is right though about you generally don't want to go chasing a trend or something
because that is going to put you in competition with literally everybody else. If your ambition
is to try to compete with Fortnite that's a high bar to hit.
So as a small company, particularly as a start-up company, you're better off doing something that is
a bit different. You can find a niche audience but a niche audience is usually enough to
support a small company. And you can grow from there. But actually doing
something a little bit different is a good way to be known. - There's no point trying to
copy an amazing game idea that's already out there doing really well. Well there's no
point copying any game because it's already out there. Everyone's got a story to tell.
Everyone's got a great idea. Experiment, you know. And if you and a few people are finding
this game really fun, then I'm sure, like Chris says, that that niche audience will be there.