For this week's edition of "Game On," The Fly spoke with two of the lead designers at Feral Cat Den, developer of point-and-click adventure game "Genesis Noir," which launched last week on PC, Nintendo Switch (NTDOY), and Xbox One (MSFT). In the interview, creative lead Evan Anthony and technical lead Jeremy Abel discussed the game's launch, Xbox Game Pass, its success on Switch, and more.
'GENESIS NOIR': Feral Cat Den's first game "Genesis Noir" launched on March 26, 2021 to mostly positive reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. When asked how the company feels about the game's critical reception so far, Evan said that he's "very happy" with how people feel about the title. "It's a fairly divisive project," the creative lead said. "It's not a traditional adventure game, doesn't use a lot of genre tropes. Our challenge has been 'how do we communicate what the game is?'" Evan noted, though, that fans of the adventure genre have liked the game, and feedback from the "non-core" audience has been "laudatory."
From a financial perspective, Jeremy said that sales have been "slower than initially expected," though he believes the game will remain in the public eye for long enough for sales to pick up, as it has been added to a lot of wish lists on PC gaming platform Steam.
"We're not doing gangbusters, but we're not doing bad," Evan added.
GAME PASS: "Genesis Noir" was available on subscription platform Xbox Game Pass on day one of release, both on Xbox One and PC. Jeremy said that the decision to launch the game on the subscription platform right away came after Microsoft approached Feral Cat Den with an offer two years ago, helping to fund the rest of the project. "By licensing our game to them, we were able to expand scope and bring ['Genesis Noir'] to consoles," Evan noted, adding that the game wouldn't have as much exposure or as big of an audience with Game Pass.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: When asked about whether the larger trends towards game subscription services, such as Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade (AAPL), are ultimately beneficial for smaller developers, Jeremy said it's "hard to say" for them, since they won't know until the first year of their game's availability on the platform is done. "I don't know what percentage of Game Pass players would have converted to Steam or GOG sales otherwise," Jeremy said. "Our publisher [Fellow Traveler] would need a fair bit of examples."
"I think in these early days as these services are starting, they are throwing around a lot of money to developers to get started," Evan noted. "Right now, it's very advantageous for [developers], because these businesses are just starting and are offering very generous fees and everything. In the future, I don't know if that changes."
“I like the subscription service idea just because I like to try out games I normally couldn’t afford," Jeremy added. "The group of games that we came out with, there were about four titles that I’ve wanted to play for years, but each title is like $60 still, and I can’t afford a $60 game whenever I want. So being able to pay $10 and be able to try out titles like that is really beneficial for me at least. But for other people it depends on what your money situation is.”
CLOUD: While Microsoft has been pushing cloud streaming availability for many games on its Game Pass Ultimate service, "Genesis Noir" did not launch on Xbox Cloud. Jeremy said players shouldn't expect the game to be on the Cloud for technical reasons. "For us, because of the version of Unreal Engine, we cannot take advantage of basically any of those extra features Game Pass has," he told The Fly. "Our game doesn’t even have achievements on Windows because we can’t integrate the latest toolkit from Microsoft due to the version of the engine we’re using. We don’t have the bandwidth to upgrade that version of the engine either, so that’s pretty much a non-starter for us.”
In terms of the broader industry adoption of cloud gaming, Jeremy said he likes the idea, though Google Stadia (GOOG) "did it the wrong way, because Stadia charges a fee for the service, but then you have to pay for the games anyway, as opposed to doing a subscription thing.” “The benefit [of streaming] for me is being able to try out a title without having to have a fancy GPU or whatever," he added. "It’s hard to get the latest graphics cards, and you can’t play 'Cyberpunk 2077' (OTGLY) unless you have that kind of hardware. Being able to experience that on an iPad or on their TV is a pretty valuable thing.”
When asked if the right pricing structure could help the launch of future streaming services, such as Amazon's (AMZN) Luna, Jeremy said that pricing "is the main thing." "I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends who’ve worked at a lot of AAA studios about it, and they say that the money has to make sense," he noted. "Because it’s in the cloud, you don’t own the game anyway. So buying a copy of it for Stadia, I don’t know exactly what that entitles you to. You still need to be online to play it on their servers. It also depends on your internet bandwidth.”
SWITCH: Like many indie games, "Genesis Noir" launched on Nintendo Switch, and Jeremy said the developer has "certainly seen a lot more Switch sales" than initially expected, though applying patches and updates to the game on Switch has been slow. "The tricky thing there is that getting patches updated to their platform has been pretty challenging," Jeremy said. "The build on Switch is three weeks before we launched on any platform, and we’re still in the process of submitting a patch to Nintendo. Even now, they still don’t have the latest thing. The benefit is that there [aren’t any] people yelling at us about it, since there’s no user feedback system on the Switch store. But it’s just really annoying to have these bug fixes and things, and they’re still in the review process because Nintendo is playing to make sure everything works.”
“There’s a trade-off on releasing games [on multiple platforms] simultaneously," Evan added. "Shipping everything all at once, we get to take advantage of the marketing opportunity and the messaging from Microsoft and Nintendo. But managing all these different builds and different approval times for patches is definitely very challenging for small developers and first-time developers like ourselves.”
"Game On" is The Fly's weekly recap of the stories powering up or beating down video game stocks.
