Stronghold developer Firefly is the latest developer to move into publishing, debuting a new strategy-focused label Wuselfaktory and its first title Fool King as part of UKIE’s For One Night Only showcase earlier this year. The title, from first-time developer Loot Donkey, describes itself as a “tactical autobattler” with a roguelike edge, in which players build and position their army before watching battles play out.
The move into publishing is “like every other indie developer out there at the moment,” studio head Nick Tannahill admits to GamesIndustry.biz, but he believes the firm’s expertise in the strategy space makes it well-placed to succeed in what is one of the PC platform’s most successful genres. Wuselfaktory is stepping into a category extensively proved out by the venerable Paradox and the more recently-established Hooded Horse, although with more modest ambitions for both scope and number of games published.
For Fool King, Firefly is funding the game and supporting the marketing, and its parent Devolver has provided a producer to help with localisation and QA, but Tannahill says that in future Firefly will look to handle the latter itself within its 50-strong team. “We actually have a small publishing team already, which is why we’re able to do this,” he says.
“We’ve been self-publishing since 2010. So we already have our own localization workflow, marketing workflow, publishing workflow. We’ve got good relationships with the platform holders that we work with.” Perhaps more importantly, it’s been building and maintaining strategy games for decades, which means it can offer development help too.
“One of the real benefits that developers can offer as a publisher is the fact that you’ve not only been on the other side of the table in terms of negotiations and relationships, but you can help them out with actual dev stuff,” says Tannahill.
“We have three online titles that we maintain; Fool King has an online element because it’s an asynchronous auto battler, they can have calls with our guys to talk through that stuff and learn. We’ve given them consultation on UI. We’ve given them multiple rounds of feedback on the base game as well.”
“That does take time away from other projects, so we have to balance that all. But an hour-long conversation could mean a much faster project and a much smoother project for the other team.”
A Devolver directive
Firefly’s move into publishing came at the suggestion of owner Devolver, which is keenly aware of its own lack of experience in the lucrative strategy space.
“We got bought by Devolver in late 2021,” says Tannahill, “and since then they’ve been kind of like, ‘You guys know strategy’ – these are their words – ‘we don’t know strategy, so why don’t you get into that?'” Meanwhile, the studio keeps a constant eye on upcoming strategy games, which made it perfectly placed to scout promising releases (although he says he actually discovered Fool King via an article in Rock Paper Shotgun).
“I play a lot of smaller titles for inspiration for the Stronghold series,” says Tannahill, “really small stuff on Steam or Itch or whatever, just to freshen my brain up for ideas for new games.”
“And as I was playing these titles, I was like, I love these things and they could be benefiting from – if they want it – funding, guidance, partnerships, whatever they want out of the relationship.”
Devolver is happy to let the studio lead both sourcing and marketing. “They don’t really know the strategy space particularly well. So they trust us with that in terms of who the people are to talk to with the press, who the content creators to talk to, the audiences and the communities that exist with all those different sub-genres. They just know we’re far better connected to them than they are.” Tannahill sees this connection as crucial in a genre like strategy, where the audience “requires you to speak the language”.
“One of the things we do to maintain that closeness with our audience is – this sounds really stupid, but we just put surveys into all of our demos and then just we’ll ask people, “Hey, how much would you pay for it? What features do you want to see? What games would you like us to make in the future?” And we’ve been doing that for three games now and just following what people have been telling us.”
“We get like 6,000 responses each time. So it’s a good sample.”
The consistent flow of data has proved invaluable for the firm’s development and strategy, and revealed a surprisingly youthful player cohort. The audience “skews much younger than we thought,” says Tannahill. “We have a good contingent of people aged 18-25. We try to meet young people where they are, on the right social media platforms, to keep bringing people into the IP, into our studio, our series. There are younger people wanting to play this stuff, which is good.”
Strategic successes
Tannahill views the strategy genre as both vast, with a huge range of sub-genres, and nevertheless underserved. “Strategy is huge, absolutely massive. If you look at the top hundreds plus wishlisted games on Steam, so many of those games are just strategy titles.”
Despite this, the classics of the genre remain neglected. “One of my favorite games, growing up, was Command and Conquer. That is just not relevant for people anymore not because the IP isn’t resonating with people, but because the new games haven’t been made.”
He sees this as an opportunity at a time when higher-profile genres have faced increasing headwinds. “It’s not sexy any more, but it’s quietly one of the most successful genres on the whole Steam platform. In a world of Roblox just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the console space kind of struggling a little bit, I think Steam is weirdly quite well positioned for the future.”
“All of these deep, systems-driven games are perfect for that audience who want to sit in front of their PC for hours and hours, replaying the sort of same scenarios in slightly different ways and seeing the emergent gameplay that comes from that. And it’s why you’ve got people like Hooded Horse coming in and being like, who knew there was this massive audience for really high quality games?”
Firefly, for its part, has been placing as many bets as it can manage with what remains a small team. “We try to have lots of different things within the strategy space. So we’ve got publishing, we make sort of old school 2.5D games in the same vein as the original Command and Conquer, the original Age of Empires. We make fully 3D stuff like Stronghold 4.”
“That sort of golden era of 2.5D isometric, perfect pixel graphics, that’s very in vogue at the moment, but who knows if that will be the case in however many years. You want to pick a basket, but then not have too many eggs in that basket that you overexpose yourself to a specific thing.”
Hence, the publishing label, although that currently represents just a single small egg, with the potential of perhaps a few more. The studio has shipped four games and six expansions since the Devolver acquisition, with more in the pipeline, and while third-party titles are part of the long-term vision they will still need to be fitted into that schedule. “We’re not going to announce a publishing label and have three titles ready baked because we can only spin so many plates, basically,” says Tannahill. “Initially it’ll be smaller titles. We work in small teams and it’s sustainable for us, and that’s the most important thing.”