For the third time in a row, here’s my review of the year of what happened at Flying Oak Games. You can check the 2022, and 2021 reviews if you feel like reading a trilogy.
I am Thomas Altenburger, game director and co-founder of Flying Oak Games (FOG) with my associate Florian Hurtaut. We are mostly known for the games NeuroVoider and ScourgeBringer, which each sold more than 100k units and reached about 1 million players counting bundles and all. We’ve been making games for more than 10 years now!
The anniversary date of Flying Oak Games is a bit vague… We started thinking about working together during summer 2013, and made the logo and registered the name at that time. But we started working on stuff only by the end of 2013, and Florian really joined me full time only by mid-2014.
Still… here we are, continuing to make games together 10 years later, and hoping to continue forever.
We should be celebrating! It’s quite the milestone, especially considering that FOG has been sustainable for a while. We’re definitely among the outliers of game studios. Though, I don’t like to call ourselves survivors, because that would be casting a shadow over people who might have it harder than we did. Let’s face it, there’s luck to it.
Yet, 2023 has been such a weird year that we didn’t even process yet that we went past the 10 years milestone. We don’t even know how to celebrate it. I always envisioned something big, like organizing a concert with all the artists we worked with and friends, but 2023 felt so heavy that other things seemed more important than the ego trip. We’ll find another reason to celebrate at a later time, likely for the release of our next game.
We’re very happy and grateful to have reached this milestone. It’s dumb but, we’re clearly no self-made men and women, and a lot of people made this adventure directly or indirectly mostly joyful. That includes friends, players, and business partners, past and ongoing, no matter how it went. I hope to be able to reflect on all that at some point, because many people really deserve more light to be shed on them.
Now that we’re here, let’s continue to build, hopefully for a long time.
I guess it’s no surprise to anyone in the game industry or interested by it that 2023 has been quite the hit. It didn’t have much impact on us beside delaying our next game (so far). Many studios had it much more rough. The main culprit in our case is that it got harder to fund games.
Economics TL;DR: games become a “safe haven” during the pandemic and a lot of cash got invested in the industry and a lot of games got signed. Fast forward to 2023, a worldwide economic crisis made the interest rates to go through the roof. Problem: publishers, funds, and investors aren’t really investing their money in games, but most of the time they lend that money. Result: an incapacity to fund more games, while the games funded during the pandemic are barely releasing just now and not quite making the ROI yet. The real implication is that funds and publishers went in “0 risk” mode, which means that they are not signing any new game beside the super obvious ones or secure bets.
How did this impact us? For the past 10 years, our track record was almost entirely sufficient when pitching new games to partners. Though this time around we were met with a lot of “you people are cool, but we’re holding our breath over here, so we’d need more to chew on”. We even had surprising propositions like “we’d really like to work with you, but what if we’d propose a 10th of the budget and let’s make a vampire survivor-like while we all wait for the rain to stop falling?”.
We started the year with a straightforward pitch and a quite bare gameplay prototype. This clearly wasn’t enough to inspire confidence in our project, and the pitch wasn’t clear enough and made people to imagine something that the game isn’t (which, to investors, means “I don’t know how to sell that, no matter how cool it looks”). That was on us. So we spent more time than we initially had plan reworking our pitch deck into a rock solid high concept and banned a few words from it to avoid confusion. The prototype also evolved into a fully fledged vertical slice with the entire beginning of the game playable in top notch state and quasi-final quality (and we’re still polishing it).
Things got much better from there and we started having discussions much more similar to what we used to have outside of that crisis context. Though in the end, we burnt the entire year chitchatting with possible partners and enhancing our proposition to a satisfying level (and we still are in “post-pre-production” at the time of writing this). It was really interesting, we likely grew as business persons, but creatively it sure is frustrating.
We started 2022 expecting to sign right away, and ended up strengthening the project through all of 2023 instead. Thankfully FOG was solid enough to do that. If we were in a different context, we might have accepted that vampire survivor-like proposition, and we know that some studios did, which is a valid choice given how stormy the year has been.
Sir Joshua, an important character of our next game.
We’re now off to new adventures! We’re pretty pumped about that new game, there is still a ton of work on it, but that extra time made things much more real and exciting. We reached that “damn, it’s a game!” moment. The team is fantastic (I really wish to announce this game to also present the team because they’re all accceees, and it’s super frustrating to keep things under wrap), and the discussions are thrilling. It’s a lot of “let’s venture out of our comfort zone” vibes, but everyone is pumped about going into a little challenge. I mean, it’s our 10th anniversary project, so it got to be a project that makes the team and our partners to smile. We’ll soon start a private playtesting round, and then we’ll be off to production for quite a while.
In last year’s review, we were expecting to grow FOG and recruit more people. 2023 made it so we had to postpone that, but we’re still on track to expand the team. Overall, that next project is roughly 2 to 3 times “bigger” than what was ScourgeBringer.