SUCCESS OF 'TOOTH AND TAIL': In an exclusive interview with The Fly, Andy Schatz, video game designer and founder of independent game developer Pocketwatch Games, said that the reception of his 2017 real-time strategy game "Tooth and Tail" was "great." "I just had someone tell me yesterday that in their 30+ years of gaming it's their favorite game by far that they'd ever played," Schatz said. "It's got a really passionate, cool audience." Schatz said that, in making the game, his studio set out to solve a problem that "a lot of people have tried, and I don't feel like anybody has succeeded at, which is taking the real-time strategy genre and making the controls fun to use." He added that the game also managed to be fun to play on a controller, which is something that "no one has ever, so far as I'm concerned, succeeded" at doing well. "It's an interesting genre in that, in a lot of cases, video games copy board game genres or copy books or copy movies," Schatz said of RTS games. "But this is one case where the video game industry actually invented a genre that other artistic mediums are then copying. You've seen board games trying to create real-time strategy games, and that's an interesting thing. Of course, it's always been a genre that's not been terribly accessible, and that's one of the reason that I think the growth of the RTS genre kind of stalled out in the late 1990s."
NEW GAME: Schatz told The Fly that Pocketwatch has started to work on a new game in the role-playing game genre, which is something he said is "sorely in need of a reinvention." While Schatz noted that the RPG genre is "evergreen" since "fans seem to not be able to get enough of the genre," modern games in the genre often aim to just get "more content density and content breadth." As a result, Schatz said he felt the need to reinvent the RPG from the ground up to make something feel more fresh and original. "With a lot of genres, when you're building something that's really, really big, you ending having to stand on the shoulders of giants with regards to design and technology," he said. "But the benefit I have from my approach to making games is basically to say, 'Hey, what if we break things back down and don't stand on the shoulders of giants because what if some of those giants are wrong or broken?'"
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY: When asked whether he would change his design philosophies if he has the financial backing of a larger publisher, Schatz said that his core philosophy isn't really affected by limitations in budget. "I make the games I want to make," he said, noting that there are "certainly" some things he'd do a bit differently if he had an unlimited budget. "But I don't think it would change anything about my core philosophy towards making games," Schatz added.
THE INDIE GAMES ENVIRONMENT: In response to a question about navigating the ever-growing and competitive independent games environment, Andy Schatz said the most important thing for developers to do is "be unique, and be visible." "One of the most important aspects of marketing is doing something that surprises people," he said. "That can be part of the product. Is the product unique? Or is the approach to marketing unique? That might be the look and feel of the game. Or that might be where you are taking advantage of some sort of new media opportunity. As of a few years ago, Twitch (AMZN) was a new media opportunity. Not really anymore! It's hard to get noticed on Twitch now. So the media landscape and the marketing landscape, because it's so crowded, it's constantly changing."
MOBILE GAMES: Schatz noted that his company has not announced any plans for porting or releasing games on the Nintendo Switch (NTDOY), which has seen numerous indie game ports since its launch a year and a half ago, and added that he doesn't have any plans to bring games to mobile phones. "I'm a stickler for controls, and while I like mobile games, the idea of taking my existing games and porting them to mobile doesn't make a lot of sense to me because I'd really have to reinvent the controls," he commented. "And when you reinvent the controls, you start to have to reinvent the game."
ESPORTS: On the topic of esports and whether he'd want his games entering that sector, Schatz told the Fly that he built "Tooth and Tail" to be "really esports friendly" and that he has seen the community for that game "really embrace" the multiplayer component. Still, he said that he doesn't expect his next game to be an esports-like game. "I do like the esports scene, it's a lot of fun! But the likelihood that 'Tooth and Tail' is going to be the next 'Rocket League' at this point is next to nothing," Schatz said. "It's been out for over a year and we're not seeing continued growth of the audience right now. So we're definitely moving on to our next game."
GAMING STOCKS: Publicly traded companies in the video game space include Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Take-Two (TTWO), Electronic Arts (EA), Tencent (TCEHY), Sony (SNE), Microsoft (MSFT), GameStop (GME), Capcom (CCOEY), and Ubisoft (UBSFY).
"Game On" is The Fly's weekly recap of the stories powering up or beating down video game stocks.
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