The makers of Dispatch thought it’d take three years to hit their sales target – but they’re ‘on track’ to hit it in three months. The superhero workplace comedy adventure has sold at least 1m copies, and player numbers keep rising with every release of its weekly episodes. Its final two episodes are out today, which means another injection of players who’ve been waiting for the whole “box set” to binge.
Two of creator AdHoc Studio’s founders see the strong sales as proof that this kind of game – a storytelling-focused adventure title in the style of old Telltale games – is still a viable sales pitch, even if nobody in those pitch meetings believes in you.
“I think it’ll be really interesting to see who tries to pick this up and follow what we’re doing,” says Nick Herman, creative director. “Because I think if you have the wrong type of content or the wrong type of game, it might not work. But it’s at the very least opened the door for conversations for people to have around this as a model.”
AdHoc wouldn’t share exact sales predictions, but they told Gamesindustry.biz that they had a target figure that was a “bull case” scenario they’d hoped to reach over the game’s lifetime, predicted as three years. In reality, things moved much faster.
“We’re on track to do that in three months,” said Michael Choung, executive producer. “So the bull case in three months… We were confident that people would like it. I think the degree to which it would be successful is something that I certainly didn’t anticipate.”
It’s also catching more attention the longer it has been out. Releases on Steam often expect to see big player counts on launch, and then a quick drop with a (hopefully) long tail as players dust their hands. Spikes will arrive months down the line with big updates, or an emergence from early access. But the picture of concurrent users for Dispatch looks different.
This is largely because the game has rolled out like a network TV show, with a double bill of new episodes every week. At release, the game hit roughly 12,000 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. A very healthy but not massive number. A week later, episode 3 and 4 bumped that to 65,000. The following week, player numbers had doubled to 131,000. It’s not hard to imagine sales will pick up alongside player numbers, especially given the common player preference to wait until a game is “done” before buying a copy.
So players are not dropping off. “It’s the opposite,” says Herman. Word of mouth and streamer attention had its own role to play, and so did positive press although that didn’t arrive at launch: “I think press only started caring, to be honest, once the audience validated it.” Whatever the reason for the snowballing attention, the decision to do weekly episodes was not guaranteed to work.
“There were a lot of conversations, internally, prior to the release,” says Choung. “Like, should we do it this way? Should we release it all at once? Conventional wisdom told us we absolutely shouldn’t have done what we’ve done… I think it’s absolutely proven itself.
“I mean, it’s not like we’re not inventing anything. This works for television shows for the last 70 years or so.”
It’s a vindication for the devs. It was, by their accounts, a difficult game to pitch. Approaching videogame investors who are used to data-heavy pitch decks is hard when you’ve got a game that focuses on storytelling and performance, where everything hinges on the script, animation, direction, and acting. When faced with such a prospect, skeptical investors naturally point to similar games that failed to sell sufficiently well.
“They’re saying, well, this game tanked,” says Herman. “And it’s like, yeah, but we look at that game and we think: ‘the creative was bad’. You wouldn’t point to a bad movie and go: ‘Movies are dead. There’s no way we’re ever making a movie again, because this movie failed.’ But that’s kind of how people approach our genre.”
“You wouldn’t point to a bad movie and go: ‘Movies are dead'”.
Game investors don’t understand what it takes to make this genre work, according to the AdHoc devs. Choung breaks out an analogy to explain the problem.
“If you’re building a Formula One team,” he says, “all the decks and all the conversation centers around talking about the cars. What kind of car is it? What kind of engine? What kind of tires? All of that stuff, the stuff that can be measured and built. It’s not great at talking about the drivers. And I think you need both if you’re going to make this type of game.
“We’re a studio that has both of those things. We do have the car, right? But we also have the drivers that know how to actually drive the car… We have what others maybe don’t. It’s just hard to talk about those things without sounding braggy.”
Much of that expertise comes from the founders, many of whom are former Telltale veterans who have learned hard lessons about how this kind of game might survive in the industry. Telltale was shuttered in 2018, and despite being resurrected years later with new teams it has been seen by some as proof this kind of game is not financially fruitful. As a result, AdHoc had difficulty gaining support, even losing partners who “gave up hope midway.”
Eventually, they did find financial support in Critical Role, the media company who predominantly broadcast tabletop role-playing campaigns, and who have dipped into game publishing. It helps that this is a well of publicity and voice acting talent – the streams and podcasts have a big audience, and one of Critical Role’s stars, voice actor Laura Bailey, plays a big role as in Dispatch as Invisigirl.
“Ultimately, with CritRole, they were a perfect partner in that they share the same value as we do,” says Herman. “And they started their company in a similar way, where it’s just a group of creators coming together and being passionate about telling interactive stories and sharing that with people. And so they immediately saw and believed in what we were doing and took a chance. Honestly, that was crucial to getting this whole thing done.”
It’s not clear how much the game cost to produce, however, and cost has historically been a sticking point with this kind of game. AdHoc was founded six years ago and this is their first release. They’ve also got a cast that includes big names like Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul, who won’t have come cheap. This kind of investment is worth it to the developers, given their type of game demands strong acting performances. Even if production costs around voice acting is a touchy subject right now.
Embark Studios, the makers of extraction shooter Arc Raiders, have this week been criticised because of a decision to use AI voices to cut costs on voice actors. But the creators of Dispatch feel such a solution is simply not an option. There are some things you can’t cheap out on.
In Dispatch, popular Westworld actor Jeffrey Wright plays Chase, a retired superhero who has aged unnaturally fast. Herman uses his performance as an example of the perils of being a voice acting cheapskate.
“AI feels like a production solution, not a creative one. Maybe it’s a creative one if you aren’t creative”
“No AI is going to do what he did,” says Herman. “He brought something to that character that we weren’t expecting. I mean, his performance and Aaron’s performance and our whole cast are bringing performances and elevating the material in a way that you’re just not going to get [with AI]. You’re not going to be surprised because it’s built on something you’ve heard before if you go the AI route. So, yeah, honestly, AI feels like a production solution, not a creative one. Maybe it’s a creative one if you aren’t creative.”
“Whatever we’re building, it has to connect,” says Choung. “It’s got to be made by people. It’s got to connect to people. We’re looking at AI, we’re monitoring the stuff that AI is doing, like everybody else. But… it seems to be having a lot of trouble trying to get to a ‘good enough’ spot. And ‘good enough’ for us is the enemy.
“Also we’re not getting up every morning and talking to ourselves like, ‘hey, what if we did this with less people? What’s the lowest number of people we can use to make this thing?’ This is like not anything that we’re too concerned with.
“We’re certainly not going to sit here and judge others for making other types of decisions… I’ll let Embark sort of speak for themselves. For us, though, right now, it just doesn’t make a ton of sense.”
