We are a video game publisher. This feels like an obvious starting point for this story you’re about to read. But we’re not an ordinary video game publisher.
Our story began in the summer of 2019. The company was founded by three friends with an idea to help Finnish game developers to find funding or publishers for their games. We were riding on the mobile game wave, pitching 50+ games all the time to major global publishers and investors. We helped over 70 game studios to get funding or publishing partnerships for their projects - in a little over six months.
Then we, like everyone on this planet, was crushed by the storm of covid. The games industry did not stop, it was actually the opposite. The only change was that we did not talk with investors and publishers at events, but we were stuck at home and pitching on Zooms, Skypes, Teams, Slacks, Meets. The boredom was… boring.
We came from backgrounds in creating games, creating and managing marketing campaigns, raising millions of money, building teams, and a lot more. We just felt like we could actually help the indie studios by ourselves. The obvious part of this was just that we didn’t want to publish mobile games since it was clear we would have needed millions and millions in marketing money, and it did not feel like a right direction for us to build a high-risk company with investor money in a volatile market brought to us by covid.
Thus, we decided to focus on PC and console games. We had a lot of connections and great games in our pitching portfolio, so we talked with the studios and got our first three games to be published. Upon releasing these first three games our goal was to create a database of actions which can be done to market a new PC game. We didn’t want to do just the bare minimum, we wanted to do simply every single thing imaginable.
This meant that for months our work days were typically 12-16 hours long. Simply because there was so much to do, and there were two of us (the third founder had to leave the company due to personal reasons - nowadays he’s an investor of ours).
After gaining a bit of traction and momentum in the market and some level of revenue flowing in, and a huge load of publishing tasks in our process, we started pitching our publishing services to new game studios. Eventually we were in a situation where we received maybe a pitch or two per month, and we just signed them all. Within one year we published 14 games - all by ourselves and still two of us.
We were doing so much, and still none of the games really took off. They were getting some revenue, and the revenues were growing all the time, but still, we couldn’t grow the team or sometimes even pay our salaries. We did consulting side-gigs, and raised a small investment sum, and we knew we were on the right track.
We did some calculations, and we had a goal. Based on our hunch and research, we KNEW that when we have published 25 games, one of them will be on a level which can provide our salaries and some growth to our company. We didn’t reach for tens of millions, we reached towards the sustainability of our company.
Eventually we came across a game which seemed like a blue ocean for us. We found a snowmobiling game. We knew that this is something we truly want to work with, and there hasn't been a good snowmobiling game since early 2000’s (Sled Storm). This was going to be our 24th game to be released. We had just one game after this of energy and time and patience to find our success.
We were grinding again. Hard. We worked again for 16 hours per day, we did everything imaginable and unimaginable to push this game. One week before the release of this game, Sledders, we promised to each other that this is the last one. If this does not fly, we will find something else to do. We were tired, we were done.
We estimated that within the first month the game would sell for about 100 000 USD. That would mean that we would get about 20 000 USD for our company after all the costs and royalties to the developer. This would be enough to keep on going.
This estimate and goal was broken in one hour after the release.
I gotta say, we were crying.
This happened in December 2023. Since that we have released many other games - some are bigger and some are smaller in revenues. Nowadays our focus is in real-world action and adventure games. Games, which have a real-world audience, for whom we can serve a realistic experience in gaming. We are in disc golf, fishing, sword fighting, and a lot more to come.
We are nowadays a team of nine people. We are not working 16 hours a day anymore, but oh boy how we still give our everything for the games we work with. We will never settle on the bare minimum or even our base process. We always go for the extra mile. I could tell so many stories on what we do, but that’s a topic for another blog post. But in the words of our investor:
“You have a game about snowmobiles? They will take their own ones and go for rides with you when they e.g., record sounds for your game. They go for manufacturers and sign sponsorship / visibility deals for your game, which others wouldn't even think about. They go towards targeted niche communities and get people who have never played games to buy a PC or console to try out a game of it sounds exciting. No traditional publishers do the same. They probably go and smell gasoline with you if it is necessary for business success. More weird, more better.”
We don’t have enough fingers in our company to count how many people told us along the way that games publishing is too hard for us, this can not be done. They told us that we better stop before we even start, there’s just no future for our company, idea, or mission.
We were lucky to have some believers. We were lucky to believe in ourselves, and we believed in one another. And more than anything, our partners at home believed in us.
There are so many twists and turns in our history that deserve to be told. So like our company and legacy, this post is merely a beginning. We are here to make stories.