“The second part is that there’s a benefit to
having an identity with consumers – especially fans of strategy games and RPGs – where they understand us as a publisher and get excited about what we’re coming out with. Specialisation really helps out and there are more than enough great indie strategy games to keep us busy.” Snow Rui, president and CFO of Hooded Horse
– and wife to its CEO – is quick to add that there is a practical benefit to keeping a narrow focus on strategy games, in that the resources needed to finish a game are far less costly compared to a similarly-pitched action game. “With a brilliant small team that are just focused on getting the mechanics right, they can have a really exciting game that can compete well with another game from a studio that’s ten to twenty times the size with a much larger budget.”
DARK FOALS It’s rare to speak to a leadership team that is quite so open about the games it enjoys, less so one that admits to only having a commercial interest in that same narrow cross section of genres. Were that the case at a AAA publisher we doubt many games would make it out the stable door, but at Hooded Horse it’s a strategy that appears to be working out.
wishlisted games on Steam, more, it seems, than any other publisher (Bethesda has two). Among them, the Homeworld-inspired Falling Frontier sits just below Homeworld 3, comfortably ahead of the likes of Funcom’s Dune survival game, Daedalic’s delayed Lord of the Rings: Gollum and even the imminent System Shock remake that recently adorned the cover of PC Gamer. Way up in fifth is Manor Lords, a game that more PC gamers seem interested in than ARK 2, Payday 3, Resident Evil 4 and Respawn’s imminent Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. “There’s a whole philosophy to doing this that’s
basically ‘make sure every game succeeds,’” says Bender, unconcerned that 17 Hooded Horse games fall outside Steam’s top 100. “Our current crop of games are all successful, I think, in large part because we haven’t looked at the one selling the most and said, ‘Let’s just double down on that and forget the rest.’ Because the truth is that most games can succeed if you don’t have this very commercial, what’s-the-highest-return-on- investment attitude.”
FARRIER COMMAND Fundamental to the rising-tides-lifts-all-boats strategy that Hooded Horse is committed to is the idea of allowing developers a share of the
Over the course of the last year, Hooded Horse
has released five games, four of them to early access and the company has been remarkably open as to how each has done. The first of them, Nebulous: Fleet Command, sold 73,000 units in its first year, which isn’t especially impressive, until you consider what a niche hard sci-fi strategy game it is. The publisher’s most recent game, Against The Storm, is its most successful, shifting 317,000 copies in its first three months on sale and inspiring 7,500 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. As for what’s on the near horizon, Hooded Horse has three titles among the most 100
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