ecosystem and deliver to people who are trying to figure out how their games will see the light of day.
A year ago you said that you wanted to break down the stereotypical publisher developer relationship? What did that mean and have you succeeded? Yes, I’ll explain what it meant. So, my background in the games industry has been 20 years of talking to consumers and talking to people as customers. I wanted to approach our developers very much as customers. What we’ve done is create a way of dealing with
developers which is much more positive, even when it comes to saying ‘no’. We’ve seen well over 750 projects come through our doors and rather than being dismissive of a developer, we wanted to give them really good feedback on why we’re not working with them. It’s really hard. It’s been one of the hardest things to look someone in the eyes – especially on vidcom, as we have been over the last year – and tell them that we’re not going to proceed with a project that they have given blood, sweat and tears over. You can see the sadness in their eyes but after that moment comes this point of reflection. Almost all developers have said ‘you know what, your feedback is exactly what our gut feeling was, we just couldn’t quantify it, we just couldn’t put our fingers on what was missing for our project. And we’re gonna go off and do some things right.’ And in loads of cases, those devs have come back to us and said, ‘we’d love to show you what we’ve changed and what we’ve done’. And their projects have been improved and changed and sculpted a little bit into being more commercially viable products, because we’ve given them great feedback. And for me, that’s what Secret Mode is all about. It’s not just about working with great developers to create and publish great games, but to have a healthy
Does that not create a rod for your own back though, since you’re acting as a consultancy, to a degree? We’ve set the team up to support that. We have a proper process with the greenlight manager and assessment team and we have clear milestones. The assessment that we’re doing on these projects is work that we would do anyway. Me then picking up the phone or talking to someone about why their project hasn’t made it through is 15 minutes of my time in most cases. And that’s fine. It’s not like we’re producing a huge amount of paperwork or reporting that is going wasted. This is stuff that is actually utilised – we have a team of assessors in place who will create that reporting anyway for us to figure out if this is a game we should or shouldn’t be working on.
“I thought the biggest challenge would be just getting our name out there but coming up with a strong brand and a strong logo and the company values early on, really helped us with that”
Do you have a flexible approach to the developers that you do end up signing with? Yeah. And we embrace it and we’re passionate about it. Not only are nearly all of our terms different, but also what we take responsibility for is very different. Some indies want to retain talking to their communities. Some folks want their Christmas Days back, right, and they don’t want to be sat doing tweets on Christmas Day, so they want assistance there. Everything is malleable. What we have within Sumo is this wonderful wealth of history, right? People within Sumo have been developing games since the Commodore 64 and having that kind of opinion to call on has been magnificent. So we get some indie devs and they’ve got a great game, but there’s something not quite right. They’ve got some issues with something or they want to ask some questions, be it audio or multiplayer, and we can call out to people within Sumo. And this is where there’s a brilliant kind of passion and interest within all the studios. If someone wants to come and help us out with some audio, or someone wants to help us out with a bit of, you know, damage meshing or AI route planning, we know who to talk to. And if they have a spare half an hour to spend just chatting through with our indie, it becomes very valuable for people. It’s that kind of collaboration and being part of the team which Secret Mode’s devs will feel.
How much is Secret Mode is Sumo’s publishing arm? With our output we aim to be 50 per cent from within Sumo and 50 per cent indie. We have
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