Celebrating 10 Years
I couldn’t be more proud of our studio turning 10 years old today. Back when we founded the company the state of the industry was uncertain and in flux. Consoles (then Xbox 360 and PS3) were walled gardens, only allowing games that have been pre approved with a “slot” to appear on those platforms. Needless to say, these coveted slots were near impossible to get and required either a break out hit somewhere else to be ported over, or working with a publisher that already had slots granted. It was the age of searching for “slots”.
The iPhone had come out a year or so earlier and some companies were reporting that there may be a market there, and because there was literally no other platform that would have us we made a game for the iPhone. That game was Roboto, which earned “Game Of The Week” and shot up to the #7 spot on the store! We couldn’t believe it, and it changed our lives forever.
With the success of Roboto people started to notice. Unity reached out and began working with us, and posted a nice piece on our little husband-wife studio. We had lots of studios coming forward who also wanted a mobile game and we transitioned to performing work for hire projects while incubating new projects internally. During this time we started experimenting with a vehicle called the G.A.V. which attacked a strange alien creature we called the “Crab Monster”.
While we worked on what would eventually become Osiris while fielding contract work to keep us afloat I also had an idea for a flight based game, in the style of a Metroidvania. We called this internal project “Source” and started to show it in festivals and attempted to get slots for it on consoles. Source received instant fame, earning a spot in the Indie Mega Booth and in Sony’s E3 and PSX booths. However, it seemed to really do the game justice we needed to wait for some rendering technology to improve, and while we ported the game to Unreal Engine in 2015 we knew that Unity would eventually catch up graphically, and we largely prefer Unity as our engine of choice. We put Source on the shelf and instead focused the studio to Osiris.
In just nine months we had a version of Osiris: New Dawn ready enough to release on Steam’s Early Access. What amazed beyond comprehension was the game actually hit the number one spot on the store! Like Roboto years earlier this changed our lives yet again, this time for more dramatically.
We’re now learning that the industry has shifted completely in the past 10 years. Instead of begging for a slot in hopes of having your project ever seeing the light of day, all the platforms are now largely wide open. This is a two edged sword. On one hand a developer can work on something and know it can be released, that it will not have to go to a gatekeeper committee to decide the project’s fate. On the other hand players have been hit with so many bad and mediocre games that they have become skeptical of games and the developer’s intentions. This happened before in our industry, back in 1983 during the great video game crash (I remember it vividly). A video game history buff myself, I try to learn from Nintendo who I idolize and credit for saving the game industry with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo Seal of Quality. Nintendo took enormous measures to regain the public’s trust not only in their company, but in the videogame industry as a whole.
It’s clear to me that the path forward is having an audience and playing to them, just a like a rock band has a following and plays to their crowd. We’re doing this with Osiris now that we have the publishing rights, and have learned to perform faster, with higher quality, and clear communication. Fenix Fire has gone from the “dark” development style that we worked from in our AAA console days to becoming live ops capable, which we’re very proud of. In the famous words of marketing legend Seth Godin, the key to great marketing is “publish often, preferably with remarkable content”. I love that marketing and creation have finally come together as one, that the gatekeepers of the past are gone, making the future is wide open for Fenix Fire. We love the medium, the art, the tech, the challenges, and it’s a great time to be making games. Looking forward to the next 10 years!