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Single-player, story-focused games have supposedly died more times than I could possibly begin to count, and yet somehow they always keep coming back. Last year's surprise hit Dispatch is a sterling example of the continued power of narrative-driven games, but the devs at AdHoc Studio had their work cut out for them trying to convince publishers to take a chance on the title.
AdHoc was founded by a core group of four developers with history going back to Telltale Games, and the studio was keen to continue focusing on the types of narrative-driven games that had been so beloved for so many players. Of course, Telltale was dead by that point, and nobody wanted to take a chance on that type of game again.
"It was a tough time to be a studio founded by two writers and two directors who were looking to make single-player, narrative games," co-creative director Dennis Lenart explains in a Game Developers Conference panel attended by GamesRadar+. "When we'd go and pitch potential investors and publishers, they'd point to the data and say there weren't enough recent successes to feel confident investing money. The common sentiment was that the genre of games we like to make are niche or, worse, dead. But we thought they were wrong."
"It was definitely a mix of arrogance and stupidity," fellow co-creative director Nick Herman adds. "But we knew that we were one of the most experienced teams out there when it comes to making these types of games. So we felt like if we wouldn't be able to push back, then who would?"
Dispatch did have a publisher for a time, but according to a Bloomberg report that partner abandoned the project partway through development. AdHoc got some boost from Dispatch's close relationship with Critical Role, but the game was ultimately a self-published project.
Through all those trials, the devs were "aligned on three things," Herman says.
"We're going to focus on things we're good at – just because we can make an open-world action RPG, doesn't mean we should," Lenart explains. "Whatever we do, we want it to be great, and across the entire project, we didn't want to have any cutbacks. Also, we weren't just employees anymore. We couldn't make a great game that no one buys. Now that we're running a studio, we have a responsibility to our team to keep the lights on. So we need to make something that has a wide enough reach to be successful, not just critically, but also financially."
Clearly, the risk has paid off, since Dispatch was already celebrating 2 million copies sold as of last year. Now, I'm sure many publishers would see those numbers and laugh – especially for a game without any long-term engagement hooks to keep players pumping money into microtransactions. But for a small studio simply trying to keep making the types of games they want to make? It seems to have been a winning formula.
