HARNESSING HOODED HORSE POWER
By making sure no game gets left behind Hooded Horse is pulling ahead of its indie rivals.
Richie Shoemaker saddles up with CEO Tim Bender and CFO Snow Rui to find out how the publisher intends to keep up the pace
A
couple of years ago if we’d had said that Hooded Horse was among the indie publishers to keep a close eye on in the post-
pandemic era, the socially-distanced response from behind most masks would likely have been a muffled “Who did, what?” Understandable, since until three years ago the Dallas-based company barely existed and has been operating very much under the radar ever since. “We were officially founded in 2019, but we only signed one game,” says Tim Bender, Hooded Horse’s CEO. That game was Terra Invicta, the first title from the team behind the popular Long War mod for XCOM, which launched into early access last September. “We didn’t release anything until May of last year,” (Old World – when it expanded onto Steam from the Epic Game Store), “So if you hadn’t heard of us until mid 2022, that’s pretty natural.” Part of the reason for the outfit’s low profile is that
CEO Tim Bender and CFO Snow Rui
its portfolio of games – recently up to 20 – are all currently exclusive to PC. Almost all of them are in or coming to early access, and for the most part exist in a niche web of strategy and RPG genres. Current and
36 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022
future releases include XCOM-style tactical games, a pleasing number of space strategy games, 4X games, a couple of city builders and a good few others; most of which wouldn’t look out of place coming from a more established house like Slitherine or Paradox – both of which were established more than 20 years ago. “We have tried to focus on one particular niche
of indie games for a couple of reasons. One is our own expertise and what we’re qualified to market, to understand, to work with.” Bender explains that he has a particular interest in strategy games that have RPG elements and vice versa. Everyone else at the company is also a fan of strategy games of one flavour or another, and that is where their combined expertise intersects. “If we were to broaden beyond the strategy-simulation-RPG and instead publish things like first-person shooters, that would go so far outside of our expertise that we would end up becoming far less effective. By going to an area that we all broadly understand and every game we’re publishing is one that I can play, we end up getting a pretty good grip on this area of games, how to market them and understand them.
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