Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the first episode of Dispatch from AdHoc Studio, which went on to become one of the biggest surprise successes of 2025. Last November, the studio said Dispatch was on track to beat its three-year sales target after just three months.
The game has now been played by more than 5 million people, and a range of things has been organised to celebrate its anniversary. A new commentary and storyboard mode are being added to the deluxe edition of the game, a soundtrack vinyl set and book are being put together by Lost in Cult, a concert is planned in Los Angeles for December 3, and the game will launch on mobile on December 9.
But the celebrations were hard won. Michael Choung, CEO and co-founder of AdHoc, recalls that the game’s release was a period of pandemonium, as the studio worked on each of the game’s eight episodes right up to the last minute. “We thought we’d be done and we’d be cruising across the weekly releases, but it was not that at all,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz.
Part of the problem was that the studio was still learning the ropes of self-publishing, dealing with things like console certification. “There were just a lot of things we were learning on the fly, and it was crushing how hard it was. And then on the other side of it, it blows up, and then it got busier. So all of this year has just been catching up to the success of the game and just trying to get it on as many platforms as possible. But it’s been a wild, wild ride.”
No one – apart, perhaps, from AdHoc itself – saw that success coming. Choung says that they talked to “everybody” in the publishing world, and no one was interested. The prevailing wisdom was that comedy and narrative-based games are a tough sell, and episodic has been a poisoned word in the industry for some time now.
“Everyone understood that these things don’t make money, people don’t buy these things. And so we literally talked to everyone. I’ve been at Gamescom the last four, five years, trying to scramble and find money from somewhere.”
AdHoc was founded in 2019 by four Telltale alumni: Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette. Things seemed rosy at first. “We initially signed with a publisher, and they funded it up to a certain point,” explains Choung. “Then maybe a third of the way they dropped us, essentially.”
The studio had to scrabble together the remaining financing in the lead up to launch. Thankfully, after a trailer for Dispatch was shown at The Game Awards in December 2024, Critical Role stepped forward to offer some finishing funds, along with “a number of other partners,” says Choung. Aside from that, AdHoc has made ends meet by taking on contract work.
“[AdHoc] was initially conceived as a work-for-hire studio, where we were just going to work on the narratives of other people’s games,” explains Choung. “We’ve actually kept that going, so there’s always been that bit of work trickling in.”
All in all, Choung describes the last couple of years as an incredibly chaotic time for the studio. “It’s like a tornado occurred,” he says – and the success of the game has only intensified that whirlwind. “It’s like, oh, you think you’re busy now? It’s going to be much busier after this.”
The secrets of success
When it comes to understanding exactly why Dispatch became so successful, Choung puts it down to how well the characters landed with audiences. In short, people cared about what happened to them.
“While we were at Telltale, I still remember one of the best pieces of feedback that we got, after the release of Tales from the Borderlands,” Choung recalls. “It was someone saying, ‘I want to keep playing this game because it feels like I’m just hanging out with my friends’.”
Dispatch aimed for a similar vibe, using distinct characters with clear personalities. “People tend to remember everyone’s name, which is something kind of rare, I think,” says Choung. “And then there’s so many characters that whatever you’re into, whatever you’re looking for in a relationship, it’s kind of on offer or in some way, shape, or form.”
He says that in an interactive narrative game like this, people tend to focus on how big the choices are in terms of their potential impact on how the game plays out, perhaps unlocking a completely different path or location. But really it comes down to the player’s connection with the characters – any choice is big if it affects someone you care about.
“If you care about the characters, it matters a lot if you break a promise to somebody”
“The reality is that you have to actually care about the choices that you’re making, it’s not really the width of the choices that you’re given. And the only way to make people care about that stuff is to just write compelling characters. If you care about the characters, it matters a lot if you break a promise to somebody or betray your friend. It’s much smaller, much more relatable choices that I think are much more memorable and impactful.”
“It’s investment in those relationships and those characters, it’s not how crazily the story changes based on the choices. Or I should say, it feels much bigger when you actually care about the characters, these small little choices that you’re making.”
Choung also credits streamers with helping Dispatch to reach a big audience. “We didn’t know how friendly it was for streamers,” he says. “You can pause at a choice and talk to your audience about, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on?'” He adds that people who had played the game already would go back and watch their favourite streamer play through it to see what choices they made.
Steam gave Dispatch a big leg up, too – which is where the episodic structure helped. Choung says Dispatch was on the front page of Steam “in some way, shape, or form” for the entire time between the release of the first episode on October 22 and the launch of the final one on November 12.
“That accounts for hundreds of millions of impressions,” he says. “It was one of those things where they called us last minute, and they were like, ‘Hey, we want to [do a] test. If we put this on the front page for your wishlisters, we want to see if they’ll respond and if it’ll do well. And if it does, then maybe we can have a conversation about putting it on the front page for everybody’. Four hours later, it was on the front page for everybody. That was the big sort of early momentum, and then everything else came afterwards: the influencers, the creators, all that stuff.”
He says it’s a testament to the levelling power of the games industry, and how it diverges from Hollywood. “Games like ours can sit next to a $200 million shooter and no one bats an eye.”
Lessons learned
AdHoc might now be basking in success, but it was tough road. Looking back, Choung says there are some things he might have done differently.
“We took longer than we needed to,” he says. “I mean, for instance, we had an animation test pretty early that we shelved. We had this project pretty early, and we shelved it, I think two different times. We were like, ‘Ah, let’s go explore some other stuff’. And if we hadn’t have done that, that means we would’ve spent more time on the game, so maybe it would’ve been better.
“But the reality is our approach is one that requires us to reexamine things constantly, and that can be tiresome at times. But I think ultimately the end result is something that feels like it’s hitting a bar that no one else has really aimed at.”
“We made basically three feature-length movies and a video game on top of each other. That’s what we did. We literally did not know that that’s what we were signing up for.”
The animation in Dispatch was done by Igloo in Thailand, with AdHoc sending over storyboards for the studio. But inevitably, AdHoc would sometimes come back to Igloo with suggested tweaks to the animation once it was done. “I feel like we did a pretty good job, but yeah, we absolutely changed stuff,” says Choung. “There’s always something that can be better.”
The future
Looking ahead, Choung says AdHoc will “definitely” pursue an episodic release model again, adding that the number of concurrent players “essentially just kept doubling” every time AdHoc released a new episode of Dispatch. He thinks the regular weekly release schedule helped: the studio was at pains to avoid the “irregular” episode drops under Telltale, which he acknowledges were “super frustrating”.
There’s also the possibility of taking Dispatch to film and TV. “It’s definitely something that we’re interested in,” says Choung, adding that Dmitri M. Johnson from Story Kitchen has been in touch, “among others”.
But right now, he and the rest of AdHoc are just glad to have a chance to catch their breath after a roller-coaster couple of years. That said, they still have an eye on the future. “There are conversations about what’s next for sure. I don’t think we’ve hard-committed to anything just yet, but there’s definitely more in store,” he says.
“The studio is focused on original IP, and we want to make original stories,” he adds. “We kind of screwed ourselves with Dispatch because it’s so big, you can’t ignore it. You can’t walk away from it necessarily. But we want to tell all kinds of different stories.
“I think right now we’re still at that phase where there’s so many options, it’s really hard to narrow down into one specific thing. But I’m sure soon enough – and we have to make a call really, really soon – we’ll be announcing something.”