We love it when we as players find nods or Easter eggs to another game or some pop culture thing, so we filled Dead Cells with little things like that during early access. That’s something that we’ve always really enjoyed doing in our games. Considering that a lot of games would see that as completely ridiculous, what was it like to expand the Dead Cells universe in that way? Last month’s “Everyone is Here!” update brought in not just one collaboration, but several fan-favorite indie games. If it ever gets to the point where the community is done, then we’ll change our strategies as far as how we approach that. Would you guys mind throwing in?” We haven’t had that backfire on us so far. We’re like “Hey, we do all this work on the game. The nice thing about it for us is that we seem to have figured out that happy balance between being able to fix things, change things, and add things for the community - all while still getting some financial support for our work. They’ll come back every six months, drop a couple of runs, and be like, “Oh, this is cool” or “Hey, you finally fixed this thing.” It’s been really gratifying. We have a fan base that includes people who’ve played since the very first early access version and still come back for big updates. It’s been extremely liberating for all of us in the sense that it gives us so much security to have a game that works like that. How does it feel knowing that people will still come back to Dead Cells to try the new content almost a half-decade after its initial release? Now, we’re always looking at it like “What can we add? What can we do differently? What’s this thing that the community’s been talking about for ages that we’ve always hated, but never had the time to fix?” It’s been really great to have that liberty to go back over your own game and say “This thing always bugged us. Then even when we did the 1.0 release, we still had more stuff that we wanted to put into the base game, so we ended up doing the “Rise of the Giant” DLC for free, just so that we could finish the base content that we wanted to get out. If you look at the base game when we launched it, it was early access, so it was truly not finished. You see a whole bunch of companies doing DLC, getting really crappy reviews for the DLC, and then generally getting bashed for milking the whole thing too much, so we were always careful about that. I’ve got a spare five bucks, I’ll support you by buying this bit of DLC.” It turns out, that works really, really well - way better than we expected it to. We hoped that people would recognize that and say “Hey, this is cool. “No, we’re going to get smashed for doing paid DLC.” We always tried to do it fairly by putting out enough free stuff and keeping the game alive by fixing it and working on it even for anyone who didn’t want to pay for the paid content. Our first paid DLC started as a test, because we were kind of terrified. We built Evil Empire off the back of that. Steve Filby: I remember when we were talking back in the day about doing DLC and the update process, and it was always something that I wanted to do as a strategy to keep the game going while making sure that Motion Twin could obviously pay for the next game and didn’t have to rush it out. SPIN: With so many games either never getting DLC or just getting one expansion and stopping, what do you think it is about Dead Cells that lends itself to so many updates both big and small? With the January 6 release date for Dead Cells’ latest DLC, “The Queen and the Sea,” dropping this morning, SPIN spoke with Evil Empire CEO Steve Filby about the game’s ongoing support and what fans can expect in the future. The 20-year-old studio actually became so serious about Dead Cells’ downloadable content that they formed a separate studio, Evil Empire, to handle the game’s updates while Motion Twin focuses on its next game (which they’re hoping to announce sometime next year). At a time when “games-as-a-service” is practically an expletive, French developer Motion Twin figured out the magic formula for successful DLC releases, adding regular content drops both big and small, paid and unpaid, to satisfy existing players and bring in new ones ever since the game’s release. When Dead Cells released into early access back in 2017, the action-heavy roguelike immediately began garnering praise for its depth of combat and gameplay.īut what even the most glowing reviews couldn’t have predicted was that as the game enters its fifth year in the public eye, its player base is not only remaining rock solid, but occasionally expanding alongside the game itself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |