Captor of the indie games market, the most reckless and risky legal entity. Five industry heroes – Mike Wilson, Nigel Lowry, Graham Struthers, Harry Miller and Rick Stuts – have been trying to boost and support the indie market since 1998 and after several relatively failed attempts they founded Devolver Digital and vowed to each other to give money to every talented rogue and not to be a faceless evil corporation. Their agreement to publish the game under their name is not the standard 20-30 pages for the gaming industry, but literally one and a half pages. Let’s start from the very beginning, namely Gathering of Developers.
Publishing staff
January 1998, Texas. The five above founded the Gathering of Developers with the goal of creating a bridge between publisher and developer so that the developer retains free will, intellectual property, and freedom in publishing and marketing decisions. The reason for the creation of the publishing house was the game Daikatana, during the development of which the publisher dictated to the developers how to advertise. An aggressive advertising campaign said that the game was worth buying only because John Romero was involved in its development and only. Also, during development, everyone adhered to the rule “Design is the law” and in the end it turned out that not only was the game transferred to another engine, barely optimized, but the game design, plot, and so on, in addition to the art design, were extremely bad. Fueled by the sad experience of this game, several developers united and founded a publishing house. Over time, other studios joined them, and two years later, in 2000, the studio was bought by Take-Two Interactive.
Who knew that the failure of one game would serve as a catalyst for the success of many indie games in the future?
During its life, GOD Games published such games as Max Payne, Mafia, Tropico, Serious Sam and others. Very, very roughly speaking, the publishing house existed under the conventional slogan “From developers for developers”. The publishing house existed until 2004 and was dissolved in the same year.
2007, Austin, Texas. Gamecock Media Group https://carouselcasino.co.uk/mobile-app/ was founded. In fact, it was the spiritual successor of the previous publishing house and it retained its old ideology. The same five people were at the head of the company. The company did not exist for long, from February 2007 to October 2008. And now we are approaching the first trick of the future Devolvers. In 2007, at the Spike Video Games Awards in Las Vegas. The publisher’s employees took to the stage in caps and rooster hats during the Bioshock Game of the Year award ceremony and began promoting themselves, ultimately not allowing Ken Levine to say a word, which shortened the time of his final speech. You can see below, time – 1 hour, 22 minutes, 38 seconds.
On October 14, 2008, SouthPeak Games acquired Gamecock Media Group and soon dissolved them. During its short life, the publishing house, forgive the tautology, published very few games. Soon the birth of Devolver Games began.
Here you may ask the question: “Why do they constantly sell their companies??». I think because the backbone of the company has always been the same people and they, having received a profit from the sale, left the purchased company and created a new one in order to continue to promote the idea of freedom for developers and make money. How amazing it is that none of the major publishers even thought of approaching communication with developers in this manner. Although, the reason for this behavior of large publishers is clear to me – investors. Giving life to beautiful things and at the same time parasites of the industry. A comparison with mushrooms would be more appropriate, yes. Investors are the mushrooms of the industry. So what am I talking about..
Austin, Texas, 2009. The same five people are founding another publishing house with the same ideology. Thanks to connections (GOD Games published the first part of Serious Sam), the first thing Devolver published was a series of HD remakes of Serious Sam, an indie based on Serious Sam and the third part of GUESS WHAT – SERIOUS SAM. They have been publishing the SERIOUS SAM series of games for three years. In 2012, Dennaton Games appeared on the horizon for them
Devolver Digital’s name in the Hotline Miami opening screen
The stunning success of Hotline attracted the attention of independent developers to the publisher. The company’s ideology, remarkable achievements of the past and growing popularity allowed them to publish 7-10 games a year. Among them are the remake of Shadow Warrior, the sequel to the remake, Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior, Gods Will Be Watching, Broforce, The Talos Principle, the sequel to Holtine Miami, Mother Russia Bleeds, Enter the Gungeon, Absolver, Ruiner and The Red Strings Club.
It is obvious that the publisher’s risk of giving freedom to developers was justified tenfold. Devolver is famous online as the most crazy publishing company. And the recipe for their success was extremely simple – just give the developers freedom, because, SURPRISE – THEY KNOW BETTER HOW TO ADVERTISE THEIR GAME. Now the name of this publisher is known to everyone, regardless of how you feel about the games they publish. Just remember the crazy performance at E3 2017, where they didn’t even show a single game. A story about their fictitious CFO poking fun at the gaming industry on Twitter (https://twitter.com/forkparker). Even their Twitter is full of sharp comments and free behavior. That’s why we love them. To understand how they work with developers, just watch a half-hour documentary about the creation of the game. I’ll briefly tell you how the game was developed – in a frenzy. Just like the good old days in the 90s. If the publisher likes it, we release it and don’t care how the public and the media react. And as Mike Wilson said – “The development and publishing of games is not communication between a legal entity and a legal entity, but simple human relations, that’s all.”.
It turned out to be a little material, but the company is quite young, and I don’t want to pour water. This is what Devolver is all about – they are as simple as possible, without corporate crap, and again – for this we love them, appreciate them, respect them. All the best, peace to your home.