Owlcat games is best known for its work on games like Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader, but its experience in self-publishing of titles like Rogue Trader has opened a new avenue for the Cyprus-based publisher.
Andrey Tsvetkov and Nikita Putilin from Owlcat spoke with Game Rant recently about their experience in publishing games with indie studios, namely Another Angle and Emotion Spark. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Published By Owlcat
Owlcat has been self-publishing for a while, and continues to support its self-published titles like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which had its final premium DLC earlier this year. It chose to use these experiences, as well as its expertise in narrative-driven games, to help indie studios with vision bring their games to market.
Q: Can you both introduce yourselves?
Andrey Tsvetkov: I’m Andrey Tsvetkov. I’m the head of publishing at Owlcat Games,
Nikita Putilin: My name is Nikita Putilin, and I’m the PR director at Owlcat Games.
Q: What made Owlcat interested in entering the publishing space?
Tsvetkov: To be honest, it is something that we were thinking about for quite some time, and it all started back in 2019. We were building a marketing unit within Owlcat Games. It was when our second title, Wrath of the Righteous, was in pre-production and we started thinking of how we would like to build up the promotional campaign for it. One of the first things that we wanted to do was to create a Kickstarter campaign for that. This is basically the first step to the self-publishing idea and then to the idea to become a publisher and help other studios to bring their creations to life. So when we were actually working on the finishing touches for Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader last year, we started thinking about if we are willing to go into the publishing space and help other teams that are similar to us, like 5, 6, 7, 8 years ago, and they’re creating their own dream game.
The game’s over the green right now, if we would like to go on the space and help them bring their creations to life. And this is something that we decided to do, just because we did extremely well with self-publishing. We launched two games as a self-publisher. They were tremendous successes, both of them, and we decided; why not? It’s something that we would really like to do. So we started to look at the market and talk to the people out there. We did not do a huge public announcement, but we actually got a lot of pitches. A lot of teams approached us with their creative ideas, and we started to look at them, and there were quite a lot. So there were many to choose from, and we decided to pick two products that we really liked.
But in fact, we didn’t pick products–we really picked the teams, because you don’t invest in the product. Invest in the team, your guys, invest in the people. So we found two studios that share the same vision as we do–Emotion Spark Studio from Serbia and Another Angle Games from Poland. We’re creating really cool games, very different ones, but the concept was fascinating to us. And we decided, “hey, these are the games that we might create ourselves.” And people work in that direction. We have the time to spare a team to work on a project like that. So it felt like something we were really connected to, and we decided we would like to work together with them, just because we know we worked a really great path as a developer, and we know the issues that young developers might face on their path to their masterpiece, so we would like to help them. We don’t see it as a solely publishing business. We really were into this as a developer as well, so we were trying to help the teams to build up their first game and to avoid the type of issues that we encountered working on our games back in the day.
Putilin: Andrey here is absolutely right. So it was, I would say, a long-lasting decision for us to go into the publishing sphere after the successful release of Rogue Trader, we do really feel that we have the brains, the experience and good opportunities to go into this sphere and be successful together with other companies that are making their first steps in the development and big gaming market.
Q: You kind of touched on this, Andrey, but how has Owlcat’s experience helped Emotion Spark and Another Angle bring their vision to life?
Tsvetkov: Well, there are multiple things that we do. We do the things that every publisher out there does, plus beyond. So there are things that the publisher should do to help the developers to strive: it’s the funding, it’s all the selection of services that a publisher provides, starting from PR, from marketing to community building, to platform relations to localization, to QA systems and much more. But for us, we are going beyond as a developer.
Well, things that might happen during the development? We know these specific spots when you could struggle. We know how the pipelines should work, and we can help these teams to adjust their pipelines and to adjust their processes, to mitigate the risks of maybe going beyond their time release window, avoiding shifting milestones and eventually spending more than they actually intend to spend. We also help them check if the key features of the game actually meets the expectations of the players out there.
We have three games developed and published already, and we’re aiming at this specific market. We know this market quite well. We think that we can give some advice here to the developers. “Hey, you should take a specific look at this specific thing, just because the player will pay additional attention to it. So let’s just focus on it and make sure that this specific thing would be exceeding the expectations.” This is the expertise that we’re sharing here at various moments of gameplay, like how deep the combat system is, how mechanics work, how the progression feels, how our narrative and dialogue, if they are engaging and compelling to the players, if the characters in the game are compelling to the players, if there are any areas that we might push further and improve. So this is the kind of advice that we are providing to the teams, and I hope this information helps them to push certain aspects of the game further.
Q: What drew you to Emotion Spark and Another Angle in particular? What stood out about those two teams to look at?
Tsvetkov: There were two factors here. The first one, these teams had really strong visions of what they wanted to do, because the important thing about every team out there, they should have the core people who know what they’re doing and the thing that they’re doing, it could be exciting in the actual product that they are creating from exciting, and they should have the capability of delivering it. So we saw that in those teams they have a strong vision of what kind of games they want to create.
Even if we are developers ourselves, with Emotion Spark and Another Angle, we act as a publisher. We don’t do this co-development thing. We don’t co-develop the game. It is something that they should do on their own. It’s their creation. It’s their story to tell, it’s their experience to introduce. So we need to make sure that they have something that would resonate with players.
And the second thing I also touched a little bit on, they should have the capability to do this and to do this on a specific budget and in a specific time frame. Because you cannot develop a game with a mindset of “you will release it when it’s done,” because it doesn’t work. It takes budgets. It takes time. We believe that these teams–and they are small teams–you can always bring more people to the team. You can scale the process. But if you don’t have the creative core team that is capable of pushing this and delivering this, nothing would actually work out in the end. So these two teams have this vision, and we believe that they could actually put this vision to life. This is basically why we decided to start working with them.
Putilin: Yeah, and they both showed us a great opportunity in the future. As Andrey mentioned, we had many, many pitches, even before we announced our publishing activities. So yeah, the vision, the core team and the potential on the market were some of the key things that we were thinking about the exact projects that we want to sign for publishing, especially the first two ones.
Q: Are you focused on just these two for now, or is Owlcat still looking for other potential studios like this to help out?
Tsvetkov: Well, we are always open to great ideas, and we’d be happy if the developers out there would approach us with our ideas and features so we don’t close this. We have this window of opportunity. We found these two teams. Right now we’re working with them, and we’re very, very happy to do this, and we’re excited to see how we will bring these titles to release. But we are always working and always looking for new games out there. So yeah, if anyone has a good idea, feel free to approach us.
Putilin: For example, we were at Gamescom recently, and even during the expo, we had a lot of young developers coming to our booth and checking out the opportunities, and as far as I know, we have another huge batch of different pitches that we definitely will be looking at. Who knows, maybe we will pick something out of those. It’s not like we have two titles for publishing, and that’s it. If we see good opportunities, why not negotiate and maybe expand more?
The Road Through the Valley
The two games that Owlcat is publishing right now are Emotion Spark’s Rue Valley and Another Angle’s Shadow of the Road. Both games have certain feelings and development divisions behind them that make them feel like a logical part of the Owlcat family, and their early demos won the publisher over easily.
Q: Let’s talk a little about these games. Specifically, Shadow of the Road ? It has a really cool setting.
Tsvetkov: I really love how it unfolds. And you know, it is not something that might be the core of the game. It is the setting, right? Like every RPG is built on three specific core stalls. It’s the story, the characters and the setting in the world where the story falls. And, of course, the primary focus of Shadow of the Road is the characters. It’s the character arc of two samurai friends, who start their journey as ronin that just lost their master, and they encounter other characters on the way. Specifically, the journey starts when they have to care about a kid. They have a task from the Shogun, to take care of a special person, a young person with a talented set of skills, and they have to protect him from enemies of the Shogun that are working with the Emperor. And this is where the story starts to unfold and all the magic things, and all the steampunk things.
It is something that surrounds them as a world, they provide some context to express their motivations, to build up the characters. You have this magic thing that mostly goes with tradition, with something that the Shogun stands for. And there is a steampunk thing that was brought to Japan by the Englishmen. In this specific game, they stand for the Emperor, they sort of have a conflict that evolves. It actually helps the characters to evolve and to push the story forward. But it’s not something that is like a primary focus in the game. Basically, this game just tells the stories of the characters, about the people who are in a specific situation here. And this is what fascinates me the most.
To be honest, when we were reviewing this project, we played a demo–and that demo had almost nothing with magic and steampunk, all the stuff was meant to be in the later parts of the game. It was just briefly touched and highlighted in the demo and specific moments. It was basically a story about people. And the opening scene was the scene in the tea house where these two ronin were hiding after the huge battle. This demo actually sold the narrative and the pacing and how it was all built. It was so engaging that we decided it would look perfect. It would just only be sort of your traditional, historically accurate Japan. And even if you put magic or steampunk here, it would just bring more to this game. They would just build more on this foundation, because the foundation is strong, and this just adds the touches that provide more interesting contexts for the characters to have.
Q: What about Rue Valley ?
Tsvetkov:Rue Valley was another concept that fascinated us. It is a story about a person who is depressed and is battling with their mental challenges. It was a story that resonates with many people–it resonated with me personally as well. It is something that will resonate with the players when they will have the opportunity to lay their hands on it. And right now we have a closed alpha version running with Humble Bundle. If you’re a subscriber to Humble Choice, you can play the early alpha of this game right now.
When we saw this, the concept was so great–we played a short demo of it before signing this project up–it was so well written. They were still trying to figure out what the art style would be, how the visuals would be. It was fascinating. For many years, it was believed among RPG players that if you’re creating an RPG, it should be all about stats, progression, classes, etc. We were delighted that, I believe our colleagues from Emotion Spark were delighted to see the success of Disco Elysium, because this was the first case like this on this scale. It proved that to tell a fascinating story, to make a role playing experience, you don’t have to create traditional gameplay around it. They had a great story to tell. They had a great idea. This success told them that this is the way they could wrap the story up and introduce it to the players.
Q: What made you go with Humble Bundle for the closed alpha?
Tsvetkov: Well, we have a really close relationship with Humble. We worked for quite a while with them and our titles–Wrath of the Righteous in particular–were part of Humble Choice. We did bundles together, and we appreciate how Humble Bundle built a player base for this type of game. We talked to Humble and tried to find out how we could push this product to people. But we didn’t want to do what we were not ready to do, and so we talked to Humble and they said “Okay, well, let’s do it together. We can bring you the people who would appreciate this kind of product that will provide the relevant feedback that we need to help you shape it further.”
It’s a great idea. It is something that I guess was never done before, neither by us, nor by Humble, if I’m not mistaken. So it’s like the first time for us when we introduced the alpha version to their Humble Choice subscribers. So both parties here are fascinated to see how it would unfold, and what the results would be. But it sounded like a great opportunity to do testing on the specific player base who love this kind of experience.
Q: That is really cool. I didn’t know this is the first time Humble has done this!
Tsvetkov: Well, I personally don’t remember when they actually introduced some sort of alpha or beta as a part of change. It was always like fully completed, released titles. But this is something relatively new to them as I believe. I may be mistaken, but I believe that they prefer it, yeah.
Putilin: If I’m not mistaken, they even started talking about that only this summer and yeah, Andrey should be correct. This kind of a closed testing is either the first or one of the first few ones that were actually held on their platform. Owlcat Games is always known for a couple of different alphas, betas, and we are huge fans of getting as much feedback as possible from our players. We are always looking for new opportunities, and we are in close partnership with Humble–we talk to them and find common ground here that we can use. Also the community likes our games, and we thought, why not try this? It’s an experiment, and we’ll see how it goes. It will be a good example for the future.
Owlcat’s Development Work
Becoming a publisher hasn’t distracted from Owlcat’s development, as if anything, it’s enhanced it according to Tsvetkov. That shows in Wrath of the Righteous’ new DLC, where the studio partnered with Children of Morta to provide a crossover that is as unexpected as it is celebrated.
Q: I know this is early days for being a publisher, but is there anything that Owlcat is learning as a publisher that is helping Owlcat as a developer?
Tsvetkov: Well, we actually learned a lot just because we are in a self-publishing field for quite some time. We learned a lot, and we did a lot of things we never did before while working on Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader. For instance, until last year, we never did consumer events and trade shows. It was our first experience building a booth in a consumer space at Gamescom and PAX West. We learned a lot from working with the platforms through these years. And to be honest, when we started our marketing team back in 2019, there were just four people out there. It was me, a marketing manager, and we had two community managers who were working with the community. Right now we have like 40 plus people on the publishing team solely working on our internal titles and helping our third party developers to push their own titles.
Right now, we feel confident to share these learnings with other developers–and to be honest, if our developers learn something from publishing, well, every developer should have an understanding of how the games actually feel and look out there on all the storefronts, and how the community perceives them. So with establishing our own marketing publishing unit, we started to intensively work with our community, and we got a really great understanding of what our community really wants from our titles. It was through surveys, through constant communication on various platforms for them. Our developers learn a lot from our publishing emphasis, because we have to be precisely sure if we’re doing something that our players would love to experience.
A lot of learning was done that way. It was based on the community–things we were trying to understand what the community expects from a game that we develop. We try to work together with developers to shift our products to a certain extent. For instance, we learned a lot from the release of Wrath of the Righteous, especially on the learning curve and on the first hours of the gameplay. As a publishing unit within the team, our responsibility was to create this bridge between the players and the developers. There were a lot of things that were implemented in Rogue Trader, especially for adjusting the learning curve from the normal difficulty level. It was a lot of things that we figured out–how we need to shape the first hours of the game when a newcomer who might have never experienced this type of universe or type of games before, how they would feel and how to experience it, how we would guide them into this new universe.
It’s not like we are acting like a business unit that just sells the game or pushes to the platforms, we’re actually trying to work with the community a lot, to work with the player’s expectations, trying to tell them how we approach specific things and getting their feedback.
Q: I have to ask, can you go into a little bit about the Children of Morta DLC for Wrath of the Righteous ?
Tsvetkov: Yeah, absolutely. That was a great thing–a sort of experiment for us–we totally love Wrath of the Righteous. And even though the focus in the past two years was mainly on the Warhammer game, and the core team worked to deliver Rogue Trader to the players, we love Wrath of the Righteous, and would like to bring more content to it. This year, we just finished our last premium DLC for Wrath of the Righteous in June, but we were still thinking about what extra things we might do for it, and what kind of things we could deliver to the players.
One of the things that resonated with us: what if we try to bring something new and do some sort of collaboration with another universe that has a similar topic of storytelling, which is based as a foundation there. And Children of Morta is a perfect example of another team, a family, in this specific case, which is battling evil. Obviously, it’s a very interesting roguelike game–I personally love it a lot. We approached the studio of Children of Morta, and we proposed the creative director. “Hey, what do you think if we try to do a sort of small DLC, introduce your universe into the Pathfinder universe, and see if the both player communities would love it or not?”. They told us, “Yeah, why not? It’s a great idea, because the topics of the games are quite similar, and we can try to blend this in and see if it would bring maybe anything new.” So, yeah, we decided to do this. It is not canon content for Wrath of the Righteous, just because it brings, obviously, another universe into the Pathfinder universe. But it’s something that we enjoyed working on and something that we wanted to share just, just for free, with the players and see how they react.
Putilin: Basically, we are always looking for some new, interesting opportunities. And the community of Wrath of the Righteous was very active, and they were always mostly helping us with all the feedback and other stuff. And as soon as the major updates were finished with their last DLC, offering them some additional content that may, as Andrey said, be an experiment, not only for Wrath of the Righteous but also for the other titles. Because, again, we hadn’t tried it yet, and we wanted to know how the community would react to it–and from what we see right now, the perception is very good, and people really like it. So we decided, yeah, go with something small that won’t be something strange and completely different from Wrath of the Righteous.
So when we reached out to 11Bits and Dead Mage and talked about what we were thinking, about how it may look. It really turned out to be a good match. The team behind Morta, we were sharing the feedback with them. We know that they liked what it turned out to be right now. Hopefully, it won’t be like the last experiment for us in this sphere, and it can become a good tradition to introduce other universes in our games and vice versa.
Q: Something I’m noticing is that Owlcat is really actively pursuing experimental ideas? What makes that so important to you guys?
Tsvetkov: Developers are people, and they tend to want to try something new. It is really challenging to do the same things, over and over again, over multiple years. So we’d love to do something new. It doesn’t only mean like working on a new universe–which was basically one of the reasons why we picked the Warhammer 40k universe to create our third game, Rogue Trader, just because, back in the days trying to figure out what kind of game we wanted for our third product, we were thinking that we spent five years, six years, working on Pathfinder. So we decided we needed to try something new, and we just started to think what kind of things we would like this new idea to be. So we just sat in a room, and we put these various ideas on the list, and on the top of the list was, “why not do a 40k game”?
It also goes in the gameplay area as well. Right now, we’re working on several titles, and a lot of them are traditional isometric RPGs, because people tend to want to do something new. They try to work in a mixed genre, or to create a product that differs a bit from the traditional thing that players expect us to deliver. It is a challenge to developers. Obviously, it is a challenge on the creative side of things. It is a technical challenge as well. One other project is based on Unreal Engine 5 and Unity, just because we would like this to be a more cinematic experience, it’s something that is not our games were not, you know, utilizing fully the cinematic opportunities because of limitations of the engine and on the camera angle here. So we would like to try something that we have never tried before. It is evolution, right?
So, yeah, it is something that strikes developers, and keeps their internal fire burning and their eyes glowing when they’re working on these products. It’s very crucial if you need to maintain the motivation of the teams and deliver great experiences. People should not burn out, not only because they work when the burnout happens–not even if you’re only working overtime–it happens when you’re working on the same thing over and over again. So change is needed.
Putilin: And just to add, it’s the same situation basically with our publishing site. So on the one hand, for example, Shadow of the Road is more similar to the games that we created. On the other hand, we feel that we don’t need to limit ourselves with CRPG stuff, and focus more on the narrative side. So here we have, for example, opened not only to RPGs, but other genres that can bring the story rich experience, some cool gameplay dedicated to narrative and other things. And this is also kind of an experiment for us, because we already know how to build a great CRPG game. It will be even a new chance for us as the developers to deliver the new experience here.
Q: And my last question is, if there’s anything else either of you would like to add?
Tsvetkov: Yeah, I guess I would also like to highlight that we have a separate and another publishing focus that we are chasing right now. It is a selection of gameplay-first titles with heavy co-op opportunities. And they are publishing under a label called Meta Publishing, which we actually own and we operate, and we announced it a couple of weeks ago when we revealed our publishing ambitions as well.
This is a publishing label that has been running for quite some time. They have a selection of products that are already out there in the market, and they helped us to publish Wrath of the Righteous. We are a single team, but this is just a label that we maintain and that helps us to distance ourselves from the line of products that traditionally might be associated with all kinds of games rather than RPG experiences. And these titles are quite different–really we like indie games, and we like new ideas. So, for this specific label, we are publishing titles that are not narrative or RPG focused, but also bring interesting gameplay ideas to the world.
So right now, we have two games that we work on under this label. One is Biped 2, which is a sequel to the puzzle platformer Biped. It was introduced several years ago to the market. It was a very successful title with several million copies sold. Another one is an interesting settlement building survival game called Nested Lands from the Brazilian developer 1 Million Bits Horde, which is a really cool concept of a survival game in the dark Middle Ages. So we don’t only just focus on all the titles that we might develop, but we are also looking widely at the market. We’re looking for new, fresh ideas, and we are ready to pick them up.
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