the market, because it is so competitive, there’s really little point bringing anything to market that you’re not absolutely convinced is highly engaging.” ForthStar are already on their fourth prototype, but
at the point an idea makes the grade, the studio will be ready to bring in more people. “From that point forward that will mean game developers, new artists and animators and designers and coders. Then as we grow towards something that we’re confident we can bring to market, we will then start to beef up those other functions of publishing, whether it’s user acquisition, customer support, community management, etc.”
they come together, actually make something that, yes, is familiar, but is surprising enough to be entertaining on a daily basis. That’s a mantra that we’re trying to bring to our game design in ForthStar as well.”
TESTING TIMES Right now the ForthStar team is relatively small, numbering less than 20, most of whom are familiar with one another having moved over from Playdemic. It’s a number that both allows for rapid prototyping of ideas, and the simultaneous setting up and tools and processes that will allow ForthStar to exist as a full-service publisher.
“We don’t like lots of bureaucracy. We don’t
like lots of rules. We love the idea of creating an environment where really talented people can do really great work.”
“We’ve got five or six people working on making sure
that back-end infrastructure is there, from an analytics perspective, from a UA perspective and customer support perspective. At the same time we’re very committed to a test-and-kill philosophy. Because of the nature of
20 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2024
FOUR THE WEEKEND Starting small isn’t just about the size of the team, but also the working week. As other studios have dabbled, ForthStar has seemingly embraced the four-day week. “I’m a believer that productivity is a measure of what
comes out, not what goes in. We’re mostly interested in people who are highly self motivated, really driven to do something really excellent. And we want to make sure that if we hire those people, we give them the best environment to do that. And so when we were researching, Alex and I, thinking about this business, and all the things we thought we’d done well over the years or things we thought we did really badly, we really tried to say ‘How are we going to write a manifesto for the best company that we can create,’ because it might very well be our swan song. So we really wanted to make sure we put everything into it. We came onto the four-day-week largely because we started to see data points in the market – from video games, but probably more so in other sectors – where people were seeing higher productivity, higher employee happiness, higher ability to attract and retain high quality talent – and I thought, ‘Yeah, this really makes sense.’” So far it is proving to be a success, which Gouge admits
could be difficult going forward as, never having done a five-day-week, means ForthStar doesn’t have a point of comparison. “I was talking to the team about this just yesterday. saying ‘Look, you know, if this works, if this is successful, then this will be a really interesting competitive advantage.’, because we’re really focused on doing a lot of really high quality creative work in four days, and then we know that we have this great three day break. But if it doesn’t work, then we’re doing 80% – and that would be a real problem.” So far so good, it seems: “At this point. I believe that the
four day week is for us. It tends to reward people who are highly creative, who are innovative, you need to have a lot
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