“We’re hopeful that Core Keeper can be that game changer for Fireshine Games, in the same way The Escapist was for Team17 or Hotline Miami for Devolver Digital.” Garry Williams, CEO Fireshine Games
Fireshine enjoyed its first anniversary back in March, but of course is coming up on a decade since its previous incarnation Sold Out was established. How has Fireshine’s first year been different from Sold Out’s last? The industry changes year-on-year and I think most publishers reflect and react to that change in order to stay informed and relevant for the games and studios they support. For Fireshine, our teams have worked in publishing for many years, so we’ve collectively worked through the boom of boxed and into the emergence and dominance of digital and I think that’s really important, to have a proven track record of launching games into the market as the market continues to evolve. Internally we talk about ‘crossing the digital bridge’
and the addition of new digital skills and resources to our existing physical knowledge and experience. We’re progressing well and the 2022 digital early access launch of Core Keeper hitting over a million units is a testament to our progress.
Indeed! Last year you said you were looking for a hidden gem. It seems you already had one in your grasp with Core Keeper? We knew we had something special with Core Keeper, but the scale of the success of that game was beyond our expectations. That’s a testament to the talent at Pugstorm, the developer and the fantastic team we’ve built around that title. We had a good strategy in place and everything worked and then some. We learnt so much from the early access launch and the continued campaign. We’re hopeful that Core Keeper can be that game
changer for Fireshine Games, in the same way The Escapist was for Team17 or Hotline Miami for Devolver Digital. Having a hit game opens up a door for more. It benefits your impact as a publisher of successful games and that’s important with the amount of Steam games being released annually. It isn’t always easy to sign the
games you want to sign, being a successful publisher of a million-plus selling early access game like Core Keeper helps to open doors in such a competitive space.
We don’t recall Fireshine announcing Core Keeper with much fanfare. Has its success taken you by surprise? We knew we had a great game, but that doesn’t automatically guarantee success. Our strategy of public playtests, Steam’s Next Fest and inviting media and content creators into the game early gave us some very encouraging early signs. We were also putting a huge emphasis on building, growing and engaging with the Core Keeper community, something we continue to do today. All of these things combined meant that going into the launch window we had a very good feeling about the game. But it smashed our expectations. We knew when we
saw the Steam numbers as soon as the game went into Early Access that we had a hit game on our hands and we were focused on maximising that positive momentum. We often say that Fireshine Games has an ability to hide in plain sight. We work with the best developers available to make the best games possible and then we do everything in our power to provide a solid platform for each game to take off from.
How do you go about repeating Core Keeper’s level of success with the other titles you have planned? We don’t intend to be a one hit wonder, we’ve built a robust business which operates in both the physical and digital space and we treat each game and each partnership as their own entity. But what works for one game, doesn’t necessarily work for another. You learn what works and what doesn’t and you put that into practice for the next game. In the same way that we’ve learnt so much in physical games and we can still deliver in that market, we were relative newcomers to digital
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