80 of them are “indie retro”. What I mean is they’ve been recently created in a retro style, whether they be for original consoles, or they might be for modern hardware which we ported like Full Void. So 80-odd games. It’s quite a lot - 13 of our cartridges. So yeah, we do talk to people about this and we do help with their visibility and that is the same for Full Void. We do help them and that’s part of their strategy; to get it on multiple platforms and and we’re one of those platforms in the retro space I think as well, on the organic PR side, it’s quite
difficult if you have a small title in terms of it being a new IP or something from a small developer. If they send a Steam code to a journalist and say ‘Can you review this?’ that guy possibly got 20 codes that day. One of the advantages we had I guess is that we can send a physical product with a nice manual. It sets us apart and it helps promote the game.
whether they get 20. A developer might just have two amazing titles, and that’s what we sign. Everyone seems to accept that pricing. Value is really important to us, because classic games
are really expensive to collect. If you want to collect those original discs and original cartridges, it’s an expensive thing to do, and this is like an alternative way of doing it. You still build a collection, you’ve still got lots of choice, but you’re not having to spend so much money which is good for some people.
MCV: An interesting release for Evercade was OutOfTheBit’s Full Void. How did it perform? Andrew: Full Void did really well. People really enjoyed it. It’s a beautiful game, which does help, but that was the first time we’ve done a single game on a cartridge. And it made sense to do that because at the time it was a brand new release on all platforms. We’ve just kind of got treated as another platform. Of the 500-odd games
that we’ve released, around 20 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2024
MCV: And now you wish to take Evercade’s physical presence to the next level? Dominic: I think one of the key things that we’re trying to do now is get retail exposure. A lot of Evercade games and hardware has been sold though sites like Amazon, but not so much of it is being stacked on the shelves in stores. We’re missing a lot of footfall. We’re missing a lot of impulse purchases. So the goal really this year is to partner up with someone, get some exposure and prove the model. Then next year, when the retailers are starting to think about what they’re going to do for Christmas ‘25, we can get in there early. It’s the razor-razorblade model: we’re going to get the
hardware in the home and then sell the games and build an ecosystem around that. We haven’t quite got there yet. It’s amazing [Andrew and the team] have done so well, to be honest with you. To me it shows that there is a demand for this kind of product, and the fact they’ve sold a million cartridges is pretty amazing, considering that it’s obviously a small company, without vast amounts of money and without an obvious retail presence.
Andrew: As a brand we were born in the middle of COVID and that set a precedent to some extent as to our ability in the first two years to get on shelves. The Super Pocket is a little bit of a reaction to that. It’s a product honed to fit better on the shelf. It’s a kind of pickup item, because with any kind of console brand it’s all about install base. You need to get the hardware in people’s hands and you have to do that in various ways. It’s a bit cheesy, but we sort of compare ourselves to
albums and vinyl and saying, actually, there’s loads of value here on the physical side. There might be some
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