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Curve Games never Fall Flat - Stuart Dinsey Madeira Games Summit Interview

Mula sa editor ng trade magazine hanggang sa CEO ng isa sa mga nangungunang publisher ng indie game, nakipag-chat kami sa beteranong ehekutibo tungkol sa ilang mga paksa sa kasalukuyang kapaligiran ng industriya, kabilang ang kasalukuyang katalogo ng kumpanya, ang tagumpay nito sa Tsina, ang pagkuha ng Nazara, at ang estado ng pamamahayag ng laro.

Transkripsyon ng Audio

"Hi Gamereactor friends, we're in beautiful Madeira for the Games Summit and I'm here joined by Stuart who is both a media and a publishing guy and I love many of the games you guys have published recently at Curve Games and first of all I wanted to ask you about Human Fall Flat because it's never-ending, right? It reached 58 plus million copies sold and it has this new collaboration with Dave the Diver, so what can you tell me about, you know, the huge success for so many years and how are you handling the project after so many millions delivered? So we're about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Human Fall Flat this summer, we published the game originally with I think seven levels and we found a single developer called Thomas Sakalauskas, and he always wanted to add additional levels to the game and he never wanted anybody to pay for the game again, so all the levels would be free, no in-game monetization and we service the community with three or four levels a year and we bring players in all over the world, we've stretched all the different formats that the game is on, it's on mobile, it's on Amazon Luna, Switch 2 recently, so we're still finding new places to put the game and we're always trying to make the new levels either a great new puzzle or a great new theme but also make them feel new and exciting, so we've started IP collaborations which have been the vogue in the games industry over the last couple of years and we started collaborating with a game called Party Animals which had been particularly big in China and Human Fall Flat is absolutely huge in China, so over 75% of our sales on PC on Steam are in China these days and that was one of the other reasons we partnered with Mintrocket who are the developer of Dave the Diver, we had a level called Vikings so we kind of created Dave the Viking, so you could be Dave the Diver in the game or you could be the main character of Human Fall Flat wearing a Viking hat."

"How did you work in China specifically as Curved Games to make the game known there and to reach that very specific, very special but huge audience?
The game was actually picked up by a PUBG influencer who was getting many millions of people while he was playing PUBG and he would have a bit of downtime and he'd start playing Human Fall Flat and it's a multiplayer game and it's funny, that's the thing, it's a puzzle game but it's funny, you don't really compete with each other other than pushing them out of windows and smacking them around the head whilst you fix the puzzle and it's up to eight players and it just went crazy towards the end of 2017 in China."

"We also made the price very affordable so when it sells it sells at quite a low price across the world and it's just built out there. We then built an Asia publishing team so we've got four people in our Asia unit who work very closely in the local market with social media and marketing and the consumers and media and so we've just continued that throughout but it also sells well in the West. As you just said we just released it on Switch 2 and it went back into the charts. Each time we launch a new level we're kind of reviving the game. It's really really interesting and you have to be of course proud to have one of the best-selling games ever in your catalogue. Let me ask you about slightly smaller games. We met the guys who did Dungeons of Hinterberg recently they're lovely, they did Austrian feel to it, we loved that and also you just recently, very recently released Wax Heads and we love the concept behind it and the developers as well. So yeah coming back from Human Fall Flat and the strategy that you just defined, how do you deal with these very different projects? One is we could say a big indie game, double A, a lot of things going on, big world and the other one is a really unique idea. So you go, you're a developer first as you describe yourself but you go scale up and down which is very difficult to this industry. I mean Human Fall Flat was a game from an independent developer and it had come from itch.io and it was successful on YouTube and so it was a small game that became very popular and that happens quite a lot in the indie space and when we're at our best we focus on indie games and keeping our personality as a publisher and we sign games that we love and we like working with the developer, Microbird who make Dungeons of Hinterberg, some of the nicest people you're ever going to meet."

"And the game has been reviewed very very well, it's not the most successful game in the world but it's a fantastic game that will sell and find an audience for many years to come. So we approach all of our games like that, we never spend too much money on a game, we want to have hits, we want to deliver royalties to our partners and Wax Heads we actually, you're right, we've just released that, that's sort of a cosy punk simulation of working in a record store and the developers Patattie Games, it's just two people, one based in Spain and one based in the UK and it's all beautifully hand-drawn and there's 30 songs on there, they're all original soundtrack and again it's a game which will find its audience and it will probably win awards, we're very very proud of it, it's been two years in the making, it's not going to rule the world but right now it's very high in the Switch chart at the moment in the UK and the US particularly. Obviously some cultures don't have that record store culture so it's perhaps going to be difficult for us in Asia with that game but we focus the title on where we think the players will be."

"Any other highlights that might be upcoming in the next few months from your catalogue?
Any future releases that you want to mention?
We have a number of games to announce soon so I can't talk about them but one of them is absolutely fantastic and it's going to be our big release towards the end of the year featuring a very popular animal but we'll be announcing that soon and all of our games, we love all of our children equally obviously, but we do have a game called Sovereign Tower coming out soon from a French developer which is a sort of a decisions matter narrative adventure and it's going down really well, the wish lists are flying, there is a demo available on Steam which I think you can play in your browser, it's very easy to play so yeah maybe keep an eye out for that one."

"We will definitely. Also I wanted to ask you about the acquisition by Nazara, it's been a year since that announcement I think it was May 2025 and you remained independent in how you operate so what can you tell me about that, did it change anything in how you guys do things, anything that we can expect in the near future coming from that?
Nazara are a very ambitious company, they're on the Mumbai Stock Exchange and the Indian games market actually has been booming whereas the rest of the world possibly hasn't or certainly been changing its dynamics and they have come from the mobile space and they bought Curve because we're in the West, because we're on console, because we're on PC and they also when they make acquisitions they leave their new acquired companies in a state of autonomy so we run Curve as if it was our own business, obviously we have targets to meet and we have a parent but they have been a very very good owner for us, it's nearly exactly 12 months actually and what they've done is they've kind of given us our spirit back, we've got our culture back, we're signing more games, we've signed a couple more games last week so we've signed nine games since they acquired us but they're letting us do it our way and be indie and care about the games of signing, not sign games for the sake of it."

"Those are the grandparents of those many children that you've mentioned before.
Okay, one thing I love about you personally is that you come from media as you said, we are media, so double questions, what do you think about the current situation with outlets, with magazines and the consumption by readers or by viewers and how would you say it shaped you to be media first and foremost to then deal with business, publishing and all you guys do perhaps differently?
Well I was a trade journalist, I was a games journalist but I was business media, I was a reporter and an editor quite young and then I built my own media company but that was up to, I then sold the business in 2012 and I always believed even as a child in telling stories, I also probably wanted to be noticed, I think to be a good journalist you need to have some ego as well and I think that there's always been a lot of interest in the games industry whether it's from a business sense or obviously the games, that hasn't changed but the general shape of media has changed so clearly it's much more difficult for magazines, it's more difficult for display advertising, it's more difficult for subscription payments for content because a bit like games themselves there is so much content to be consumed it's difficult to find a reason to convince a consumer or an advertiser if you like to help fund your business so I think now for media there is just as much conversation about games, there's probably more trade insights than ever before particularly on Substack and I think that the best content will always come through but I do feel sorry for the many excellent games journalists who find it difficult to if you like proceed with a properly paid career because the current dynamics seem to be that all content should be free and journalists shouldn't get paid and everybody thinks they're a journalist that's the other thing everybody can broadcast so it's the gatekeeping if you like has changed yes yes yes perhaps that answers my final question which is the same question we were thrown at last night's dinner we were asked you know in five years from now which is the one thing we wished we had fixed in the gaming industry this week is that for example how media operates do you have another answer to that the one you shared yesterday or not I think I jokingly said maybe we need to fix the socializing and the drinking in the industry but who would want to lose that's improved a lot I think it has actually and inclusion as well yeah and I think that's an example actually of how the industry has matured and it's more diverse I think there's there's more opportunity for people from different backgrounds and it's much easier to get your your game to market or to make a name for yourself in whatever your your particular skill is in terms of how do we fix the market I'm not sure I agree with the question so that kind of that that's assuming that there's something broken okay and I'm not sure there's something broken I think the market has changed very much in the last five to ten years even since Curve has been around and I think it's very difficult to to get your game noticed I think it's very difficult to ensure success when you've invested in something but the idea of a fix I've been in the industry long enough the market always changes and the best games are successful and the best people have success and successful careers and that will always be the case I think that's a perfect way to to wrap this up so thank you so much for your time Stuart and enjoy the rest of the event thank you very much thank you"

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