It’s all smiles over at Secret Mode right now. Since breaking free from Sumo Digital (and its parent Tencent) last year, the newly independent UK publisher has been going great guns.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom, chief publishing officer James Schall says Secret Mode has seen “phenomenal growth” over the past 18 months. At the outset, they made a business plan leading up to 2030, he says, and “we smashed it within about four months.”
He adds that the separation from Sumo – aided by investment from Emona Capital – was relatively simple, and that Tencent has been “very helpful” throughout the process. “I couldn’t believe how quickly the deal was done to extricate us from Sumo, and how positive that experience has been for everyone,” he says.
The separation made sense on both sides. As Schall says, after Sumo was purchased by “the vast Tencent machine” in early 2022, there was a process where the Chinese giant was working out what to do with all the many companies within its portfolio. “[They] didn’t need 18 different publishers, right?” That tallies with what Tencent’s Yong-yi Zhu recently told GamesIndustry.biz, where the firm has been making decisions about which companies fit with its long-term strategy.
But what about Secret Mode’s strategy? As Schall and CEO Ed Blincoe explain, the publishing is targeting two pillars: “pure indie” titles, along with higher budget games like Star Wars: Galactic Racer. The hope is that investing in quality will help the publisher punch through.
As Schall says, in the current environment where discoverability is only getting harder, “it’s almost impossible to sell a mediocre game”, and even selling a “very, very good game” remains difficult. “There is no easy answer anymore, there’s no kind of playbook. You just have to try and make yourself lucky by making the right decisions.”
And some of those decisions involve investing in games that have already seen some success, but that have the potential to do much more.
Caretaker development
Secret Mode has placed a big bet on Star Wars Galactic Racer, due for release on October 6. Schall says the wishlists for the game are “phenomenal”.
Blincoe says the game was “exceptional when we played it for the first time over 12 months ago, and it’s only got better as we’ve gone through that period of time. We’re really confident in the game.”
Galactic Racer has been developed by new UK studio Fuse Games, and Blincoe says Secret Mode signed it at the end of September last year, after convincing Emona Capital it was worth investing in. “We walked through the door and said we have this opportunity, we need to figure out how we can possibly fund it: they helped us find out how to fund it.”
But the publisher’s other high-budget investments are of a different nature. Secret Mode has taken on publishing duties for Fancy Games’ Escape the Backrooms, which was initially released in Early Access in 2022, as well as Anegar Games’ Chained Together, which came out in 2024.
Schall says co-op games like these – or friendslop titles to give them their much-maligned but now seemingly unshiftable modern moniker – cater to an audience that is used to being online. “They grew up during COVID, they’re used to interacting on Twitch, and that’s where they’re hanging out with their mates,” he says. “I think you can either just go, ‘Yeah, it’s viral, and it’ll last for about four weeks’, or we can iterate on it, and bring more things, and try and keep people within that home.”
Blincoe says that in addition to publishing the games, Secret Mode is taking on the development of them via trusted partners – the external development studio Blackbird Interactive has already been working on Escape the Backrooms for a while. In addition, Secret Mode has opened its own internal development studio in Sheffield, which “will help to continue to make content for those games,” says Blincoe.
He adds that both games sell “a good number of units each month” and pay for their own development. “And what we’re seeing is new players coming in and wanting more, and the existing community wanting more content as well. So that’s why we’re trying to deliver that for them.”
This is a new ‘caretaker development’ model we’re seeing in the games industry, where other parties are taking over the reins of existing titles when the original developers decide to move on, even though the game itself remains a going concern. French developer Evil Empire recently took over content development for Blobfish’s hit game Brotato, and the studio is actively looking for other titles it can help out on.
Schall says there’s a “number of opportunities with developers who have found success, and they’ve become a little bit trapped in their work from wanting to be creatively different, the community is very demanding, or they’ve just been very financially happy with their income and they want to go off and do something else. How do they do that? We’ve come along and helped individuals reset, re-find their love for their games, and we do the publishing stuff. Which is not easy, but we’re very experienced at it, and we know great people to help us do new things.”
The long tail
It’s something Secret Mode has history with: Schall gives the example of Wobbledogs, which was created by Tom Astle, but was “stuck” in Early Access. “It was just him and a couple of artists, and [he] didn’t know how to move it on. And we came along and went, ‘we’ll release it’. And now he’s got the creative freedom to go and make something completely different.”
Nowadays, it’s increasingly about the long tail for games like this, rather than an all-or-nothing launch. Schall was previously at Sega for 13 years, and he said he saw plenty of games that “didn’t peak on day one”, but instead grew their audience over time. “So I knew that there was an opportunity within games that were either in Early Access or had launched and not hit their potential.”
“Discoverability is one of the biggest challenges this industry faces”
Sometimes it’s a case where a game has yet to find the right audience, “either because the algorithm hasn’t pointed people to it, or that audience is somewhere else,” says Schall. He says Secret Mode has had a number of success stories with games that launch with “not great sales numbers, but then six months later you’re sitting on a highly profitable project.”
Yet finding that audience still remains difficult: Schall admits it can sometimes come down to luck, perhaps with an influencer picking up on a game. “I think discoverability is one of the biggest challenges this industry faces,” he says. “Because everything is [based on an] algorithm, and the algorithm will tell you you want the same thing as everybody else, ultimately. How do we break that? I would say that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night.”
Young guns
What is clear, however, is that the old playbook – preview a game to the press, do a big marketing push at launch, then move on to the next title – doesn’t really apply any more. Schall points out that a teenager can put a game on Roblox or Itch and gain an audience of millions without any outside help.
“They don’t know what a publisher is, and they’re sitting down being a massively successful developer. Some of them haven’t even got business accounts… They don’t even know the industry, and they’re disrupting it.”
He says that Secret Mode needs to “look at those opportunities” in terms of the “young, new, disruptive games that are coming through”, in an age where visual fidelity is “not a thing any more”. Games have been racing towards photorealism for decades, he says, but now we’ve reached it, players have become more interested in fun, and games with a distinct identity.
“I think as an industry we can learn a lot about that by finding our way to the fun first.”
While visually stunning games like Star Wars: Galactic Racer will remain important, Schall says, “there are going to be other experiences that we look at which could be, who knows, a vector-graphics, 2D, mad game, but it’s fun.”
“We’re not turning things down because of the size, put it that way”
Two pillars, two very different types of game. On the one side, titles based on huge IP made by sizable teams; on the other, tiny indie projects like Everything is Crab. It will be fascinating to see which pillar Secret Mode ends up leaning on more in the years ahead.
Schall says the publisher remains open to bigger titles if they come along. “We’ll go and run the numbers and see if it works. We’re not turning things down because of the size, put it that way.”
But Blincoe cautions they have to ensure Secret Mode is a “stable ship” before committing – or potentially overcommitting – to future projects. “The reality now is, let’s see how the games that we’ve signed go,” he says.
“We’ve got some more announcements coming up over the next few months to next year. And then let’s see where we get to. Let’s see how Star Wars goes. Let’s not run before we can walk. Let’s get to the other side of Star Wars, and then we’ll make a call on how we move everything forward for the company from there.”