Folks, I got a big juicy opportunity at PAX Australia this year. I got the chance to chat with one of the big brains over at Devolver Digital.
I mean, I had lots of big juicy opportunities at PAX this year that I am supremely grateful for. It all honestly doesn’t feel real. This is one of those situations, considering Devolver Digital has been responsible for some of my favourite games ever made, including Cult of the Lamb and Death’s Door.
So when opportunity knocked on my door and said, “Hey stupid, wanna talk to Graeme Struthers, one of the founders of Devolver Digital?”, I couldn’t say no. I simply couldn’t!
I sat down with Struthers and had a chat about all things Devolver, including why they love the Australian games industry so damn much and what they look for in a game that they decide to publish. Check it out!
So how are you liking PAX so far?
Love it. It’s great.
Really enjoying it?
Yeah.
And have you had a chance to look at the PAX Rising Booth? Seen anything you like?
Yep. Not going to tell you though.
Aw, why not?
We’ve seen quite a few things we’re going to go and check out later this afternoon. So we’re going to meet with a few devs whilst we’re here.
For business reasons?
Yeah. Maybe. Possibly. Perhaps. I’m trying to think, we’ve got four games in production right now from Australian devs.
I know you’ve got Cult of the Lamb that’s come out. Big congrats, huge move. One of my favourite games of this year. And I knew that you were doing The Plucky Squire as well, which I will ask you about later.
And then with Team WIBY, Phantom Abyss. And one we can’t talk about.
And one you can’t talk about. That’s going to be exciting. I feel a real sense of pride seeing Australian games come out of Devolver Digital, it rocks. So what I want to ask is what sparked this decision to take a look at the Australian industry?
Well, Devolver’s kind of lifeblood has been doing events. That’s pretty much how we’ve always got the games out in front of people. So we started in PAX Australia I think 2016, 2017. And at that point when we first came down here, there was a small number of indie devs around but not that many.
So we’ve seen exponential growth in the scene here. I guess if I look at the shows we’ve done where we’ve signed or we’ve found the most games or game developers, I’m going to say PAX Australia is probably number one or number two. It’s certainly up there, which when you consider how small the actual scene is, that’s over indexes. So there’s got to be something going on here. Right?
There’s something in the water.
I think also there is some decent government support, right?
Yeah. We’ve got VicScreen which does a ridiculous amount of support. Screen Australia has recently been doing more of it and Screen Queensland as well.
Yeah. So I mean, if you’ve got that in any level of funding against developers to the first stage of prototyping, it’s super helpful.
Absolutely. So right from the very beginning. So Devolver started out by publishing Serious Sam remakes.
Correct.
Some say that publishers going for remakes is putting new ideas on the back burner, but I would say that Devolver Digital did the opposite and started with those remakes in order to be able to go out there and push those numbers forward.
Yeah. I will tell you it’s fair to say that without Croteam giving us the chance, I’m not sure how… Because we didn’t have any money. We had no way of funding ourselves. So the only way to get some money was to start selling something. So without those HD remakes, I’m not sure how we would’ve gotten here.
Well, I mean, what sparked the shift from going to those HD remakes to seeking out new indie ideas?
Well, I mean the bottom line was at that point, it was like, if you go back a step, Harry, Rick and Mike, who are also founders of Devolver, they had previously been Gathering of Developers. Their mantra was basically the devs keep the IP, which back in the late nineties was pretty unusual. Croteam was one of the devs they signed, therefore Croteam won their IP.
So when Harry decided we were going to try again, because we had a few companies that didn’t quite work, when we tried again, Harry went back to Croteam and said, “Okay, what can we do?” So it was like a harmonious moment because they were looking to get funding for Serious Sam 3. The HD remakes were a bridge, if you want to put it that way.
And then like all good games, Serious Sam 3 took much longer than Croteam thought it would. So Nigel had this idea somewhere in between the HD remakes and Serious Sam 3, what if you gave the IP to small indie devs to just basically do what they think is interesting?
So that was really our first kind of entry into working with some of the small indie devs that were out there at the time, Vlambeer being one of the three. They introduced us to Dennis and Jonathan, the creators of Hotline Miami. And that kind of took us on another step, but much of Devolver has never been planned and we didn’t have a plan. That wasn’t something we were aiming at. It just kind of happened to it.
From my perspective, it seems like Devolver was one of the first publishers, or at least it’s been one of the pioneering publishers of the indie publisher and allowing indie games to thrive. So how important do you think it is to have these kinds of publishers in the industry right now?
I mean, I can only see it from our point of view, which is probably a bit myopic. But indie games are actually our destination. It’s not a journey to something else. This is where we’re happy. This is where we’re most comfortable. This is where we have the most fun and arguably, it’s the most creative space we have in the games industry.
And that’s not taking a potshot at anybody else. I think that’s just a statement of fact. So yeah, it’s been great and it continues to be so. I mean, you’ve mentioned PAX Rising downstairs. You can look around there right now and you’re seeing really polished games across many genres. There’s not just one note down there. It’s quite breathtaking how wide the spectrum of games is.
And that in itself is really encouraging because it kind of tells you can actually think from the point of view of you want to make family games, there’s an audience for that. If you want to make hardcore games, there’s an audience for that. So that’s really encouraging.
Yeah, absolutely. And talking Devolver specifically, you guys kind of have a tendency to go for the wacky games, the weird shit, the real fucked up grotty stuff. Why?
Okay. Some of the developers we’re working with today, they’ve been working with for six or seven years. Free Lives comes to mind. We started with Free Lives with Broforce and since then, we’ve just zigzagged the way that they’ve zigzagged. I mean they went from that to Genital Jousting.
They then went from there to Gorn, into VR. So we get the benefit of that. Right? It’s almost like we’re just following their trajectory. And it’s been like that.
If I think of Le Cartel, their first game we did was Mother Russia Bleeds, which was a Street of Rage, side-scrolling beat-em-up. The next game was Heave Ho. It’s a party game. When you look at Devolver, it’s also an expression of where the developers are going, which is great because it means we don’t have to have a strategy.
You still don’t have to have a plan.
Still don’t have to have a plan.
That rocks. So Cult of the Lamb. I want to talk about that because boy, did that pop off.
It did, didn’t it?
How are you feeling about the success? Did you see it coming?
I don’t think we would ever be arrogant enough to predict a hit like that. You can see the elements coming together. You can see the reaction as people start to get their hands on it and you can feel the momentum building.
But when the champagne cork comes out of the bottle, you just don’t know how high it’s going to go. And I think with Cult of the Lamb, I think everyone including us was like, “Wow, that’s quite surprising.” And it was everywhere.
And sometimes you’ll get games that really take off maybe in America, maybe in the UK, but it took off everywhere. Which again, it’s kind of interesting. A cult about a lamb is universal. I don’t know what that says.
Yeah. It’s so funny because I remember when it was just starting to come into the media. There were people going like, “This is demonic. This is promoting satanism.”
It’s the ambition we have.
And hey, there’s nothing wrong with just having a weird little fucked up guy who’s in a bad situation. That’s the story. But I think people liked that it was just the shift from a very cutesy little lamb running a cult. It’s the jarring kind of look of it all.
I was in France when it came out and my French is pretty appalling, but it made it into mainstream media. And there it’s Culte De l’Agneau. Bless his little heart.
That’s beautiful. So you’ve got another Australian game on the back burner, which is one that I am really looking forward to. I saw it at Devolver Digital’s Countdown to Marketing and I went ape shit. Honestly, I went nuts. The Plucky Squire. Is there anything you can tell me about that?
What do you want to know?
God, as much as possible. How’s it been working with All Possible Futures?
So I’ve known Bidds a long, long time and we go back long enough, he was working at Curve Studios. He made a game with Nintendo called Fluidity, which I loved.
And I would see him because obviously at that time I was working in London pretty close to where Curve’s offices were. So I’d kind of get him out for a beer and kind of like, “What are you going to do next?” And just kind of kept on nagging him that at some point he had to come and work with Devolver.
So we did Swords of Ditto with Bidds. And then he did what good game devs always do. He then just went and spent quite a lot of time prototyping and figuring out what he could do next. And during that time, he moved down here. His wife’s Australian. When he sent through the original pitch for The Plucky Squire, we had the same reaction you probably had when you saw it. You don’t really have to talk much more than just say, “Okay, where do we sign?”
I think it was the same reaction that I had when I saw Cult of the Lamb for the first time where it was just like, “Oh, this looks like something immensely special and very different.”
And it’s that thing where… Obviously, that’s the great thing from our side of the fence is that we are seeing what you’re going to see maybe a few months before we were actually ever going to reveal it.
And that transition you get from going from 2D to 3D is even for us, when you’re playing the prototype of the game, you’re kind of like, it makes your jaw drop. You can’t help it.
Yeah, we’re really excited about it. We’re letting Bidds take his time. We don’t want to put any pressure on him in terms of when it comes out, but hopefully, it won’t be too long.
I sure hope so too. Trust me. So last but certainly not least, what would you say Devolver Digital looks for when deciding to take on an indie title? I know that’s such a loaded question.
It is a loaded question and it’s got quite a long answer really.
Spill it.
If you go beyond the actual game pitch itself, I mean from a production standpoint, you want to understand that the developer actually knows the scale of the thing that they’re trying to deliver. So the start point, the midpoint and the end point of the project, what does it look like?
And you then get into the weeds of how to deliver on that, the team structure you would need, how many artists you might need, how many programmers you might need. To some degree, once you get beyond the actual idea itself, you look at how it’s going to work from a development point of view, which is the more, I don’t know, the drier, sort of boring aspect of making anything. So if you’ve got to have faith a developer can deliver on their vision and the good developers tend to already have most of that worked out.
So when you start talking to them, you can see how this is going to come to fruition. So that’s the more mundane aspect I suppose. When it comes to actually what makes you want to work on a game, it’s typically the same thing. It’s the same thing with probably anyone. How does it feel when you actually pick up the controller? Even if it’s just a grey box demo, how does it feel? Does it feel intuitive? Can we get a sense of the gameplay? If those things are there, then everything else is much easier to imagine.
And also with the team itself, it’s a bit like a relationship. You’re committing to each other. You’re going to be together for quite an intense period. You have to get along. You have to feel comfortable with being honest with each other because you won’t always see things exactly the same way.
So it’s quite an undertaking and it’s a very personal thing as well. So you tend to find with the developers that we work with and the Devolver people that work with and you couldn’t tell which one’s the developer and which one’s the Devolver. They get very, very close. Yeah.
So Devolver’s looking for even more Aussie games to publish… Very interesting. Can’t wait to see who!
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