SPACE ROCKS! H
amburg’s Rockfish Games has been one of two German studios to have made any kind of impact on a genre that’s
Michael Schade,
been in the shadow of Elite for far longer than the earthbound shooter was ever beholden to Doom. While compatriot Egosoft has been building on it’s X series of space sims for nigh on 25 years, Rockfish has taken just ten to establish Everspace in the space gaming firmament; the first game debuting in 2017 before it received a vibrant and expansive sequel earlier this year – selling 300,000 copies in its first few weeks, despite being available through PC Game Pass for the best part of 18 months. Far from being the plucky newcomer, however,
Rockfish does have a considerable history in the genre, one that stretches back to the dawn of mobile gaming, when Rockfish co-founder and CEO Michael Schade was the co-founder and CEO of Fishlabs, and it’s game Galaxy on Fire 2 was as well known on the emerging iPhone as Doodle Jump and Cut the Rope.
With Everspace 2 coming to console this month, Richie Shoemaker talks to Rockfish co-founder Michael Schade about the studio’s successful space shooter series, leaving mobile gaming behind, ditching crowdfunding and why Game Pass is the place to be
THE DARKENING At the game’s height, says Schade, as many as 40 million people had installed the Wing Commander-inspired title on their phones. This was however after the base game was given away free – rather reluctantly it turned out, with Fishlabs eager to get out of free-to-play just as everyone else was piling aboard the bandwagon. “I had a lot of discussions with Apple,” Schade
recalls. “Actually, I was one of the few telling [them] ‘You’re making a big mistake. You’re completely missing how premium games work’.” Schade argued against allowing developers and publishers the ability to set their own daily prices, believing it would be catastrophic for premium games like the-then $10 space game. It was inevitable, he says, that “everybody was going to sell their games for 99 cents” and a “race to the bottom” would ensue. “I was like ‘This is the end’”, he says. For its next game in the series, Fishlabs
reluctantly dabbled with a free-to-play model, but there was no passion for the project from within the team, which didn’t endear it towards potential investors and the studio filed for bankruptcy. It was a dark time.
48 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2023
“Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky really sucked out all the air of the room for space games. We had to reinvent ourselves”
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