Delphi Interactive’s success with FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition and 007 First Light has created new opportunities with major brands, according to CEO Casper Daugaard.
During a panel at The Paley Center for Media attended by Game File, Daugaard shared that there’s “been quite a few conversations with some of the most iconic brands in the world that are intrigued by our model.”
This model focuses on creating games for fans rather than only for a “subset of gamers” interested in a particular IP.
Delphi applied this approach to First Light, securing the license and partnering with IO Interactive for development.
“We said to the family and to MGM, ‘We’re not making this James Bond game for gamers, we want to make this game for James Bond fans’,” Daugaard explained.
“The whole game: the driving, the social stealth, the flirting, the MI6 program, everything should be in there. And it should be an interactive experience. It’s one of the best and most immersive ways to experience the big brands.”
He added: “If that sounds like semantics, I’ll try and argue that it is not, and it has huge implications for how we got into business.”
Delphi used the same strategy for FIFA with Netflix, aiming to reach a wider audience that includes the global football fanbase beyond players of EA’s previous FIFA titles.
“[Netflix] saw the potential. They saw that we had essentially no time to deliver, but, conveniently, we wanted to make something that was actually also a bit more casual and something that anyone could access.”
FIFA was developed by Refactor Games and published by Delphi. It was the first FIFA series release since the split from EA Sports in 2022, launching two weeks before FIFA Heroes.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year, Daugaard said Delphi’s purpose is to “license, finance, develop, and publish games built around the world’s most iconic IP.”
Delphi president Andy Kleinman reaffirmed this mission to Game File, noting the company’s goal to address the “misalignment between bigger publishers and some of these iconic entertainment brands or sports brands.”
“Maybe they’re not prioritising some of those third-party IPs as much. That opened the opportunity where we said, ‘You know, there are these huge brands that people love. This product doesn’t exist. We should make it.’ We should become that partner, because we want it to exist.”