It’s no secret that those shadowy guys with all the money to fund games generally don’t have much interest in narrative heavy, singleplayer games. And yet even still, games like Dispatch continue to do very well for themselves. Even still, for developer AdHoc Studio, the funding process doesn’t sound like it was an easy one, but in their self-admitted “arrogance and stupidity,” they went on to make it anyway.
GDC kicked off yesterday (sorry, GDC Festival of Gaming, whatever that means), and Dispatch creative directors and AdHoc co-founders Nick Hermand and Dennis Lenart took part in a talk at the conference discussing that funding process (via PC Gamer). Having formed the studio in 2018 after leaving Telltale Games, the leads of course began looking for funding for games, with their biggest problem being the growing interest in live service games.
“When we’d go and pitch potential investors and publishers, they’d point to the data and say there weren’t enough recent successes to feel confident investing money,” Lenart explained. “The common sentiment was that the genre of games we like to make are niche – or worse, dead.” Herman, seemingly poking some fun at themselves, noted that they thought these investors and publishers “were wrong, which was definitely a mix of arrogance and stupidity.”
Given the team’s experience in singleplayer, episodic games, Herman questioned, “if we wouldn’t push back, who would? And while we didn’t yet know how we were going to do it, we were aligned on the right things.” So the team of course leaned into their strengths, ultimately returning to their roots, and clearly for the better. “Just because we can make an open world action RPG doesn’t mean we should. Whatever we do, we want it to be great and across the entire project,” Lenart said. “We didn’t want to have any caveats.”
Of course, who knows if AdHoc can replicate their success with a second season of Dispatch (if they can figure out whether they’re doing one or not). Though, I could probably comfortably place a bet on the answer being yes they can. Luckily, I’m not a gambler, and I’ve got no horse in this race, so more power to ’em to do whatever they want.
