“Some of the offers were actually offensive” – How Clutch found its publisher

0:00Harinder Sangha: There was a lot of publishers that thought, right, we can take advantage of these guys. We can absolutely take advantage of these guys. Even sometimes coming up with a rev share that was even less favorable to our first deal, which is nuts considering we're in a place where, let's say, we didn't need any dev funding.

0:18Mike Brown: When you do the same thing over and over because it worked, it's like, yeah, it'll work. It might probably work a second time. It might work a third time. But people are going to get bored of that and they're going to reject it at some point. And at the point in which they reject it, it's going to drop off a cliff. We absolutely believe that within Amazon Games, we probably would be their biggest game. I think we probably believe, yeah, we probably will have a bigger audience than Tomb Raider. I would want gamers to consider us one of, if not the best, game development world.

0:46Harinder Sangha: Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. This week's edition is sponsored by HelpShift, a keywords platform. Now HelpShift is an AI native player engagement platform, but it's designed to be a good one. According to HelpShift, players do trust AI to help them, it's just that most AI and video games weren't built to. It says that 66 % of players are comfortable with AI handling their issues first as long as there's a human being behind it. 74 % want it resolved without leaving the game and 58 % will quit over a bad support experience. students agree to 80 % of studios see AI becoming the default for player support.

1:28Harinder Sangha: Help shift believes it can close the gap with care AI. One AI agent can handle a lot but not everything. A billing query and a self-harm disclosure cannot share the same tone, rules or guardrails. Care AI lets you build individual specialist AI agents, each being an expert where it matters and handing off to a human when it should. You can find out more at helpshift.com or check out the video in the newsletter attached with this very show. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. This week we welcome two of the founders behind Maverick Games, studio head and creative director Mike Brown and COO Harinder Sangha.

2:08Harinder Sangha: Now Maverick Games is a team made up of mostly leaders from playground games, specifically the Forza Horizon team. Mike was formerly the creative director on Forza Horizon. and the studio formed in 2022 and in 2024 signed a deal with amazon for its first game that game is called clutch a title that looks quite a bit like forza horizon but is actually a bit more story focused earlier this year amazon dropped the title and handed it back to maverick as we revealed exclusively on the game business despite the fact the company had basically funded the whole thing now maverick then took the game on itself and revealed the title at summer game fest in june And incredibly, after the reveal, Amazon has gone back to Maverick to try and sign the game for its lunar streaming platform.

2:52Harinder Sangha: We broke that story too via an interview we did with Amazon back in July. Anyway, although the game was mostly funded, Maverick did want some publishing support. It did want a bit of extra finance to launch the game properly. So it went back out looking for a publisher and it found one in Focus, the publisher behind A Plague's Tale and Space Moon 2 and Snow Corona and games like that. Now, two weeks ago, I finally caught up with Mike and Harinda for a pretty candid interview on the end of its Amazon partnership, why it's picked the publisher it has, the offensive offers it received from others, the unpredictable performance of racing games in the market, and its goal to become the best video game studio in the world.

3:32Harinder Sangha: It's a great chat. Actually, before we begin, for those watching this interview, you'll notice that Mike and Harinda are in a car. specifically they're in their Fiat Multiplar which is in their office and they used it as part of their live stream to reveal clutch. Anyway I virtually joined them in this car for this interview. That's all I'm going to say. Please enjoy it. Hello Mike, hello Irinda, welcome to the show. Hello Chris, thank you for having us. Hey Chris. Is this the car you're driving to Gamescom in?

4:02Mike Brown: Is this the...

4:03Harinder Sangha: Well...

4:04Mike Brown: That was discussed. This car, well we did try and drive it in a circle around the car park once and it didn't make it um and so the thought of trying to travel it all the way across europe is a little bit daunting um i dare say we'll do it at some point um at the moment though it's it's indoors and due to fire and safety uh regulations we've had to like remove some parts from the car so that it can't just uh spontaneously ignite so at the moment it is it is a non-running car with some bits removed for yeah when we uh when we joked

4:32Harinder Sangha: about taking it on the road to gamescom to chris and andy who look after who look after this and source a vehicle for us, they were just like, no, not a chance. Not even trying to get into a conversation about how we can get this going. Nope.

4:44Mike Brown: I honestly think at this point it would be cheaper to just buy another Fiat multiplier and then drive that one to Germany.

4:50Harinder Sangha: Although surprisingly hard to come by, aren't they?

4:51Mike Brown: Well, they are very rare. That's kind of part of the charm.

4:55Harinder Sangha: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the news that's just come out, which is you've got a publisher. Clutch has a new company publishing your game, Focus, Space Marine 2 and A Plague's Tale and Snowrunner and all those sort of games. So go on, why them? What made them the ideal partner?

5:10Mike Brown: We'd actually spoken to Focus a whole bunch of times. They were someone that we spoke to way back before we signed our first publishing deal. And at that point in time, their business didn't really stretch to the level of spend that we were looking to do. I think to be really, really truthful about it, they obviously very much liked the game. I think the game actually does kind of fit with them quite well in terms of the things that we're pushing for in our game. obviously the game is set in France and they are French that is like a very basic observation but it's not nothing that is actually something that they are Focus are a popular company in France that have like good I guess home team support and our game is kind of quite French with its setting and theming but first time around we were punching high and looking for perhaps a little bit more money than Focus would typically spend on well any game.

6:00Mike Brown: This time around that wasn't the case we were not really looking for much any money at all to be honest that wasn't really what we were after what we needed was publishing and distribution services so key thing is marketing which as a little independent game developer we don't really have any people or resources for so all of that would just be kind of out of pocket spend with external companies which is a big cost and just a big a bit of an unknown for us additionally publisher services such as qa localization customer supports all of this stuff which I think can perhaps sound a little boring, but is actually crucially important in getting the game over the line to market.

6:35Mike Brown: That's kind of the sort of things we're looking for. And at the moment we were, I think, a pretty appetizing offer because the game was effectively done. There's no risk around kind of can the game get finished or is the game good because you can play it and you can come and sit with us and you can spend several days playing it. And Focus did that and that was actually quite reassuring. More than everyone else we spoke to, Focus were insistent on spending a huge amount of time with the game. They had people play it for a full week where they played through every single piece of content, every single feature, single player and multiplayer.

7:09Mike Brown: We never actually saw the report, but there would have been a detailed internal report giving a full status of the game. I think that just shows a level of commitment to it, isn't it? They're taking it very seriously. In terms of Focus, you listed some of their titles there. They're obviously not the biggest publisher in the world. but they do consistently deliver quality and they do consistently kind of overperform i think what people would have expected and i think that's true both critically and commercially like plaguetail picked up like a ton of awards right both both of them are very critically acclaimed uh obviously last year they had huge success with the space marine 2 game i think again more than more than most would have bet on on that game and that then puts them in a position where they've had a kind of frankly a big hit with space marine 2 and their business needs another big hit right and obviously we're also trying to make a big hit.

7:56Mike Brown: And with a company like that, we know that we will be one of, if not the biggest thing they have going on. When you plug into, I'm not going to mention a name, but you can fill in the blanks yourself. If you plug into a much larger, maybe American publisher, sometimes there's just no way that you can be the most important thing to them. Maybe not even in the top three most important things. You're just a bit of their business where they've got an opportunistic chance to, oh, we can just pick this up now. All we have to do is fund marketing, and then we can get a bit on the back end. And that doesn't really have the appeal to us because we're just a thing on the shelf for you.

8:26Mike Brown: You've clocked us being a bit cheap, a bit of a kind of honestly a guaranteed bit of money making because there's so little cost going in that you will just make money. That's not really what we want. We want you to show a bit of commitment and show that you're going to kind of put your whole organization behind us. And even before the sign, right, as I just mentioned, they had very senior people in their company spending a full week in the game. And I think they kept it afterwards, didn't they? Yeah, they carried on playing, didn't they? And that's just like, they're taking it really, really seriously.

8:55Mike Brown: I'm not going to name the names of who are playing it, but it was like really, really senior people within their company were spending a lot of time with it. And I think there's a level of kind of commitment and belief that they've shown there, which gives me reassurance that they're going to kind of put their best people and put their best efforts into it, which isn't always true with large other publishers, which it's no fault of their own, really. They just have bigger parts of their business that are worth nominee that they have to put their kind of best people and best efforts into.

9:22Harinder Sangha: Yeah it's interesting you say that right because it might sound really obvious that somebody plays the game but quite often they don't they just don't and it's important to us we are a developer our game and it's our first it's our own IP it's the first title that we're bringing to market it's really important that people are invested in it just as much as we are and finding the right partner to do that was that was really important to us. So having people that play games that are actually making decisions, it's so key. And I think that you don't, rightly or wrongly, you don't get that a lot in publishers where they're actually really do care about the game versus how much we're going to make out of this.

9:59Mike Brown: Yeah, there's, we've been through this a lot, and we're with a lot of different people, but you're in certain rooms with like, you know, maybe there's seven people from the publisher also serving different purposes. You've brought multiple PCs, consoles, you've multiple screen setups you've come there so we can do a really long demo and like two of them will come and pick up and play it and oh yeah okay yeah yeah okay it feels like yeah yeah okay right cool and you're like we've flown like 14 hours to get you you've you've not even played for 14 minutes

10:27Harinder Sangha: flown 14 hours we bought our own tv we bought a pc carried it across this across continents

10:33Mike Brown: and in a lot of them they are just they are focused on purely on the the business and the commercials and it's like they're looking at it again yep game looks good there appears to be a video game here um and then they're getting straight into the the business of it and i think there is a missing piece there where like do you actually like it do you want to work on it you you guys in this room are going to be like well we'll be working together on this do you like it because that's going to affect how much you're going to put yourself into it how much you're going to like commit to it and yeah i don't think perhaps they realize how that looks to us when you're like you're they're saying nice things they're saying oh yeah game looks really good Yeah, great, great.

11:07Mike Brown: Yeah, everything seems good. They actually, you realise like, do you play games ever? Yeah. I don't know if you do.

11:14Harinder Sangha: Yeah, and it goes back to people make games, right? And it is still a business of relationships as well. So we were in a very fortunate position going out to look for the right partner to work with. Because like Mike says, we had everybody interested in us. Everybody we spoke to and more we chatted to. First time around, we're chatting to again. but it's about how they came into that relationship and you know it's not a surprise the industry's not in a great place and we as an independent developer i think there was a lot of publishers that thought right we can take advantage of these guys we can absolutely take advantage of these guys even sometimes coming up with a rev share that was even less favorable to our first deal which is nuts considering we're in a place where let me say we don't need any we didn't need any dev funding right so it was a very very different scenario and it we were just i think we were quite taken back with how some of the people were coming in with us really weren't we so yeah i mean it's

12:13Mike Brown: probably not that surprising to you chris but like we present it with confidence and swagger we present it like this is this game is great we know it's great this game is finished this is the schedule there are no notable risks you can see everything you can check over everything we're happy to be completely transparent and so we come into it like completely confident like and as h says not actually asking for them any dev funding, just publishing services. Sorry, punch the mic. And I think that we do that with confidence, honestly, to tilt a deal in our favor because we don't want you to think that you can push us around and bully us.

12:43Mike Brown: There is an option where we just say no to everybody and just go ahead and take the risk and self-publish and do all those things I just described earlier that we don't really know how to do, but we could try and learn on the way. That is an option that we could have gone with. And that's kind of how I wanted them to feel that we're able to just, we can't just walk away. we don't need you. We'd very much like these services, we'd like the de-risk on our part of you taking care of these things for us. But yeah, some of the offers were, well they're actually offensive.

13:13Harinder Sangha: Well I'd just like to take the moment though to say all these publishers will be really happy to speak to you again when we're coming with our next project.

13:21Mike Brown: Well we didn't say that. They'll be scratching their heads. Yeah.

13:25Harinder Sangha: Well, Focus is quite an interesting company. They like to do things for specific audiences that are very targeted and then has potential to break out. And that's their whole, we just had them on the show last year. And even their smaller games, like the Snow Runners of the World, they're profitable little titles that do very well in the niche that they do. And also, I've told this story on the show before, I met up with the TimeSplitters developers, ago but going back very very far yeah and they told a story about how they made the decision to go from eidos to ea with time splitters 3 right this is different area different ea of course and with times bitters 3 they did these they do these test mock reviews right and um the reviews for times three were great it's a good game at the same time they were publishing a golden eye game which is all times bit as devs for the original gold 19 and the reviews were coming back poor so ea moved the marketing budget of time splitters 3 onto goldeneye because they needed to sell more copies of that and they just thought timepits would look after itself because it reviewed well.

14:23Harinder Sangha: Very radical design, just mortified. And those are the decisions big companies have to make, right? It was probably a logical decision, right? We need to make sure that this sells well. This is probably going to sell itself. And you really don't want that when it's your baby, right? You've been doing a lot of PR yourself lately. Are you handing it all over now?

14:41Mike Brown: They will be certainly helping us with that thing. Yeah, we've been, you said we've been doing it Yeah, yeah. I mean, I suspect Focus will still very much like me to jump in front of the camera and talk about the game from time to time. So I don't think that will be stopping anytime soon. And honestly, we've found this stuff to be quite high value, pretty good ROI on things like this where you kind of take an hour to go and chat about the game. We've been getting pretty strong feedback on that. And so efforts in versus rewards out are pretty favorable. So I'm pretty sure we'll be counting on doing that.

15:16Mike Brown: But yes, Focus will now be helping us out with all of our PR and marketing. But I don't think that means you'll see much less of me, if you're worried about that, Chris.

15:25Harinder Sangha: Well, I was more thinking about it because you've got that maverick spirit, which is the thing, right? It's the reason the name. And it's that innovation that comes through. The idea is it's from how you built a studio to the games you're making. But also, I imagine the way you want to talk about it, because even your reveal video was different, right? And it's just, I thought, well, that's in keeping with who you are. and I guess when you hand stuff over there's an element of we want to make sure that you retained that spirit of your identity yeah it's funny you say that because even with the reveal video we did because I'm pretty sure that um most AAA publishers if we said we're about to announce our uh really big budget at the time um AAA game out of a back of a two grand multiplier and start it in a 10-day stream in our car park and move it in they'd be like no you're not but you're right it was absolutely in the spirit of being maverick and doing things in a different way and i think you mike have got a really strong opinion about how that should come across as well really um yeah exactly i i i've worked in and with big businesses a lot and the maverick spirit if

16:28Mike Brown: you wanted to call it that it is a pushback on the very common if not business philosophy then it's definitely a business behavior which is to just kind of repeat the thing that worked and that doesn't sound stupid, right? It worked. Repeat it. But you only get away with that so many times and you don't know how many times it is. And when you do the same thing over and over because it worked, it's like, yeah, it'll work and it might probably work a second time. It might work a third time. But people are going to get bored of that and they're going to reject it at some point. And at the point in which they reject it, it's going to drop off a cliff and it will go from being this thing that worked to the thing that is now worth nothing.

17:00Mike Brown: And you see that in our industry all the time. Like when we have business shifts from loot boxes to battle passes to purchasing premium skins. Like you, okay, well, the skins, people are paying 12 quid for skins. All right, get skins in every game, skins in every game. And there comes a point where the cliff arrives and no one's ever buying a skin ever again. That's true for so many things where the point that an audience just gets fed up with it at some point and then it doesn't tail off and doesn't like come in smoothly. It just, it goes away. And so rather than going, okay, let's repeat the same things we've done previously, let's try to have a guess of what, either what could be the next thing or at least something that hasn't been done before so at least feels fresh.

17:38And that's why I come into these things.

17:41Mike Brown: It's like, we know the audience. We know players. We know what our gamers are like. Let's try and come at these things with things that are fresh and new and interesting and exciting. Like the multiple thing, it was gimmicky and it was stupid, but it was geared around, right, at that point we've got no publisher. We did have some marketing budget, but it wasn't a lot. And we need to make the whole world now about us. And it's like, what can you do, which is so unusual that it kind of forces people either social media to talk about it, influencers to talk about it, game sites to talk about it. We wanted to get headlines in the week of Summer Game Fest on basically every game's website.

18:17Mike Brown: And we are a relatively unknown studio and a game that's certainly completely unknown. And I want it's front page on every single game's new site. And it's like, well, how do you get that in a way that is still wholesome, still like, you know. I could have obviously gone on Twitter and just said something absolutely outrageous. which would have done the job.

18:37Harinder Sangha: On a daily basis, very, very likely to happen. I'm not going to...

18:40Mike Brown: It's always a risk. My draft folder is so spicy. I won't send that. It's like, do you want to save us a draft? Yeah, I will. But very spicy. But that was kind of how it comes about. It's like, we want to get a huge amount of attention for virtually no cost in a way that kind of feels playful, fun and wholesome and then gets people understanding what the game is and know it back. And it honestly, as much as it was my, I hesitate to even call it a concept because it was a bit, it was a bit stupid, but it actually achieved a level of cut through and awareness that we would never, ever, ever have imagined.

19:18Mike Brown: And yeah, honestly, if I'd known it was going to go as wide as it did, I probably would have done a different script. The stuff that I was talking about in that video where we're talking about like car customization and underglows and stuff, it's like general audience like your mum and your dad they don't care about that, they don't care about that at all we didn't even mention Monaco in that video and it was upside down

19:41Mike Brown: if there was any question about whether it was live the app that we were using I think didn't write itself on the camera I was like it wasn't upside down

19:51Harinder Sangha: I'll be honest it looked like a stylistic choice I thought you did it on purpose what was really funny I was sat on the opposite side and watching it was like oh it's upside down this is actually hilarious yeah yeah

20:04Mike Brown: I thought it played into the sort of the chaos of it yeah well yeah it did I mean it was pretty cut yeah because I was I'm holding it like this and I can see some of the chaps that happen on the tech side over there and I could see him but I didn't know what it was so I just had to carry on

20:19Harinder Sangha: you had to carry on that's it something has gone wrong

20:21Mike Brown: I have no idea what it was but I think it played out well I think added to the fun yeah

20:25Harinder Sangha: one of the things I do like about our reveal as well is the way that we did that it felt very playful in the way that maverick is right so that was absolutely our studio spirit the way that we are and everything that we are as a as our culture and personality um and i don't think maybe with that whole stream the way that was done i don't think people would have expected to see how well quite frankly stunning our game is and then the quality and the prestige that game is off the back of that 10-day stream as well so i think that was It kind of fell into the, we're playful, but we are actually delivering some really cool, amazing stuff.

21:00Harinder Sangha: Obviously, I've been covering your story since you formed, which was 2022, I think. Yeah, yeah. But I don't want to assume that all of the listeners of the game business know. So let's go back to the deal you signed with Amazon for the game we now know as Clutch. I mean, obviously, hindsight's a wonderful thing. But why did that, I mean, I guess the partnership has been a good one in an unexpected way. But why the time, what was it you're thinking, these are the ones?

21:27Mike Brown: Yeah, I mean, it sounds, I don't know, hopefully it doesn't make me seem stupid now. But at the time, really brought into a vision. I believed in a lot of what they were saying they were doing and going to do. Yeah, so this is, all these conversations are taking place kind of end of 2023, start of 24. We kind of locked in around GDC in 2024, so March 24. And the pitch was that they are exceptionally well-funded, which you can believe because it's Amazon. And their remit is to become the biggest AAA publisher. And you're like, okay, cool. I like that they're aiming big. Being the biggest is good.

22:11Mike Brown: And that does match with how Amazon operate generally. They are, if we're going to be in the business, we're going to try and be the best or the biggest in this business. And they sold us a pitch of what their whole portfolio would look like and the other games. And a lot of those games were announced. Obviously, people know about Tomb Raider. The Lord of the Rings game was announced before. Obviously, it's now been shut down. New World was making money. At this point, I think the console version hadn't come out yet. And there was a few other things that actually, as pitched, seemed like a credible portfolio for a AAA publisher.

22:51Mike Brown: They also had the fact that they'd acquired MGM to become Amazon MGM. And with that, an absolute treasure chest of IP. And they sold us on a dream of where Clutch would fit into that. and at the time it made complete sense and as i mentioned earlier with with focus like you you when you're jumping in with one of these companies you want to be a really important part of the business and you in truth in the whole amazon business you could never be important because aws makes untold billions um and so you can't really on an amazon all-up level become important but on an amazon games level like yeah we absolutely could we absolutely believe that within Amazon Games, we probably would be their biggest game.

23:38Mike Brown: I think, probably believed, yeah, we probably will have a bigger audience than Tomb Raider based on the historical performance of Tomb Raider. And I hope that doesn't bite me in the ass, by the way.

23:51Mike Brown: But Tomb Raider is a known thing, right? They sell a pretty consistent amount every time. And they've got a TV show coming out with it. They do, yeah. Based on historical performance of Tomb Raider, you can kind of get where they're going to reach. Beautiful open-world driving games do have a pretty high ceiling in terms of player reach. So you're looking at this portfolio as pitched and thinking, yeah, we could probably be their biggest game, at least in time. Maybe not game one, but game two, game three. We probably ultimately become the biggest thing they've got, and therefore you start to be the thing that that publisher is building their business around.

24:28Mike Brown: And loads of things have to go right in order to reach that end point, but it's a thing that you can kind of believe in. That's the dream. It's a dream, yeah. You can see a path to that point, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And certain other businesses, and again, I'm trying to avoid just naming it in case. Pick your large American publisher. They have games in their business that make billions and billions every year in the way that a game like ours just can't quite do. Like we can do big money, but not the same as a big sports game that has loads and loads of micro transactions. for example or or another really big game that's coming out this year there's um those kind of games will always be the most important part of those businesses and there's nothing you can do to ever unseat them uh whereas i think you kind of you want to be in one of the publishers where

25:15Harinder Sangha: you can be that or you can get that and amazon could have been that yeah that's what it felt

25:19Mike Brown: like and i feel silly now that i kind of bought into that dream i don't know i don't know i think

25:25Harinder Sangha: at the time the industry hadn't quite fallen apart by the when we start looking at that and there wasn't but there wasn't that many um partners that we were talking to at the time that were offering the kind of budget that we were looking for they felt like the right people for us and i say they when they spoke to us every interaction we had with them it felt like they believed in what we were doing as well and they could take our ip to that next level that at the time i don't any other publisher could so it felt it's absolutely felt felt like the right thing to do yeah yeah you can always say that you know big companies moving into games it doesn't often work out but sometimes it does and you know if playstation sony is probably one of the biggest and strongest examples of that right if you were psygnosis you know in 1995 um five or whatever and you're jumping in you know the the benefit they have there at least for a period of time you know even warner Brothers and TT Games and Rocksteady in a way sort of, you know, getting involved at the early stage of that can certainly pay off.

26:25Harinder Sangha: But then, you know, Amazon did a thing that it does and other companies have done. They changed their plans. Did you, I mean, did you see it coming?

26:36Harinder Sangha: I don't think, I mean, we had a really good relationship. The day to day relationship with them was, it was pretty good. I mean, they had hired some people, really experts in the field as well, to work with us. And it was, honestly, it was a joy working with them. But they went through some big redundancies, right? And obviously, their business started to change. And then I think we started to see some of the strains coming through of that. It was relatively quickly before. That was almost like when they made some redundancies in October. I think that was the first time we started to feel the effect for us.

27:13Harinder Sangha: But we were still, you know, we were still heading for. I've said this to them, to their face, in an episode of the show we did recently where I was a bit like, but Clutch seemed to still fit with the vision. I understood like we're moving away from MMOs. That's not the space we want to go in. We want to go in something a bit more mainstream and a bit more mass market. And I was sitting there going, but that's what you're, that's what I felt you were making. So I felt it fit. Yeah. So even though I understood, you know, I got it, they were scaling everything back. I did think it sort of fit in the same way that Tomb Raider, because Tomb Raider is a bit, you know, it's a cinematic element, has a mainstream appeal.

27:48Harinder Sangha: It could be a, they've got a TV show. I got why they kept hold of that. And I was personally surprised they didn't keep hold of the game. But, um, yeah, yeah. But, but, but, but it's ended in a good, pretty good situation, right? Because I think from I understand the game's pretty much very close to being done when they sort of pulled out. You've now retained the IP. So in my head, you've effectively got a almost fully funded AAA game handed to you, which I mean you made. I wouldn't say handed to us, Chris. We did have to make it. Yeah. We kept it in our hands, you mean. I beat you to the caveat there.

28:24Harinder Sangha: I mean, you obviously had to make it. But you know, in terms of from a financial point of view. Yes. Yeah. Was there any cause for concern when that happened? Or were you just thinking,

28:32Mike Brown: I can't believe how lucky we've got. I mean, some people would have been concerned. We might have had very different reactions

28:40Harinder Sangha: because when Mike was like, huh, okay.

28:44Mike Brown: I ain't got to get concerned about this.

28:46Harinder Sangha: Me, when, well, you told me because you had got the news, told me and I was like, oh, God. Right, because you can't, your first instance, as you will see, right, is there is a lot of stuff that we're going to have to change now. We're going to have to pivot and start thinking about the long term. That's the instant reaction.

29:06Mike Brown: I mean, H is so conventional. She'd have already been thinking about who she's going to make redundant.

29:09Harinder Sangha: Oh, stop it. Don't say that. Oh, my God.

29:19Mike Brown: Yeah, in the conversation with, as I'm finding out, I know the terms of ideal really well. So I'm already like, And honestly, the timing of it was just in terms of, I can't get into the specifics of how the deal was exactly structured, but the timing of it in terms of specific dates were really favorable in terms of what would happen next, I guess, in terms of commercials. So as I'm being told, I'm just like, okay, cool. Because I knew that we got all the rights back. I knew that the terms meant that they just lose everything in terms of rights to sequels and even the right to be told about sequels and things like that would all fall back to us.

29:58Mike Brown: And in terms of just the commercial dominoes that would then fall were good, they were favorable. And so in the conversation where I'm getting told, basically being dumped, I'm a bit like, is this going to be good? I'm already like, this is all right. Like it feels bad because they're breaking up with you, but it's like, get to keep all the stuff. it's like they're breaking up with you but they're just going and you get to keep the house in the car well um yeah and the dog um but when i'm telling you perhaps i don't know you might you might not have as quickly done done the maths and realized well i so i knew it was favorable but

30:39Harinder Sangha: like i said you start thinking about what the what the effect of is within your entire business straight away within obviously your 30 seconds to process was very different to my 30 seconds to process, right?

30:50Mike Brown: Yeah. And obviously as a business, at that point, that was the only income the business had. The only money coming in was from them. And so that tap stops and that is bad. And then the next time we can effectively get income is releasing the game. And so as a business, that is bad. You're supposed to have cash flow. But the numbers did add up to reach the bit where the next bit of cash flow would happen.

31:17Harinder Sangha: and now I know you can't talk about it but now Amazon says to us on the show that they want to re-sign it for Luna which is, yeah.

31:30Mike Brown: Yeah, I mean they could have added it if they wanted it. They didn't have to dump us. But yeah, as I mentioned Chris, we're not, because there's some live conversations there so I think we just can't really jump into that one unfortunately. I know it's really nice to tie that in a bow.

31:47Harinder Sangha: Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, for me, it sounds, you do not have to comment on this, but for me, it sounds like somebody bought a house, gave the house back to the original owners, and then asked if they could rent the room. So that's my sort of take on it, but it was just obviously good for you. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about Plutch then. Well, it's a cinematic racing game. Who would you say is it for? Is it Forza players?

32:18Mike Brown: Well, what I'll say is that I obviously know that Forza audience very well. I know what they like, I know what they've enjoyed over the years, and I know what they've not been able to get out of that game. And I think first and foremost, we're not going to be here and be so silly as to claim that we're going to kill Forza Horizon, we're going to take that whole spot. because I don't think that's wise. And I think any game maker that is going to have their pitch be that they're going to usurp the dominant market leader. Well, I think that's really high risk. I think if we swap genres and we said, I'm going out pitching a game and I'm saying, we're going to kill Call of Duty.

33:01Mike Brown: We're going to take the Call of Duty spot. No one's going to back that. No one's going to give you money to do that because it's stupid. You can't kill Call of Duty. There's like five separate development studios some of the best game makers in the world on it with a budget of untold millions and a huge audience that adore that game. And so you're never going to kill Call of Duty. So instead you have to go, those players that bought Call of Duty, they can buy a second game. And instead you need to see what fantasies are not being fulfilled by the game they're currently playing that we can offer that means that they'll jump over and they'll play a second game.

33:34Mike Brown: And Clutch was always intended to be kind of complementary to Forza. there's obviously gameplay in our game that is similar to theirs you still drive beautiful cars around great roads in gorgeous environments but Reforza's never really going to touch on story, that isn't a thing that they're going to go big on in any case it's actually something that probably I hope they don't get upset me saying this, it's something that franchise has historically been fairly weak on but it's a thing that gamers and people love, we love characters, we love stories we love that across all of our media That isn't genre specific.

34:10Mike Brown: Like Taken has great characters and great stories. I don't think that's anything to do with even video games. That is just a human thing that when we meet characters that are interesting, that are flawed, that you can kind of root for as people, we like them. And I think adding that into this genre in a way that strangely hadn't really been done, certainly not recently, and certainly not well, I think does actually have really broad appeal. I think for all those players that are getting a kick out of Forza Horizon 6, of which I understand there are a great many of them, I think this offers something that is complementary to that experience, where if you've been playing Forza Horizon 6 and having a great time, you'll probably install Clutch and realize that it's offering you a familiar experience in some areas, but then a ton of different stuff that that other game isn't offering, and it has an almost innate human appeal.

35:03Mike Brown: Equally, it's really good fun and it's got really beautiful cars and you can drive around South France, which who doesn't want to do that? So there's an innate appeal to it, I think, on just that level as well.

35:13Harinder Sangha: I find it interesting, obviously, the other game I put racing game, Summer Game Fest at the same area was Star Wars Galactic Race, a very different game that also has a story component to it with characters and maybe it's the thing. Well, here's the thing. For 20 years, I've been looking at video game charts and market data analysis and I love to predict how well a game's going to do. and the games I find almost impossible to predict are racing games. A dirt will come out or a need for speed and it will do really, really well. I'm like, oh, great. And then like two years, three years, whatever, however many years later, a sequel will come out and it does nothing.

35:44Harinder Sangha: And I sit there and go, huh. And it might be it wasn't quite good enough. I didn't scratch the right it. But my weird assumption for a while was that people don't need that many racing games. If you have a console player, you get one. You've got it. Maybe you want an off-road one. Maybe it's a couple. but you don't need to have another one like three or four years later. And then Forza Horizon comes along and throws that theory out the water because every single time there's only Forza Horizon, it does some incredible numbers. You live it. Can you explain it to me?

36:13Mike Brown: Yeah, so I can try. So I think that Forza Horizon has a... It offers a very base fantasy. the one line descriptor of a Forza Horizon game is it's a festival of music and cars in country and that country obviously changes per game but the base fantasy if you want to go and drive around like this fun music festival that has a load of cars in it in Japan, Mexico, UK, wherever the one liner of that is like really crisp and I think has a very, very broad appeal now then the game backs it up with it's got incredible graphics load the cars um great great gameplay um great social features blah blah blah um but the the one-liner pitch of it is good enough to get your interest yeah that sounds like something i would enjoy um that's also true for the crew um where the crew is we've built basically all of america and you can drive across it that's the pitch and i think straight away you're like okay that sounds interesting and then then then back up with all the other stuff.

37:20Mike Brown: And I think The Crew is, to your point, an example of a game that you might have struggled to predict the numbers on, but then performed exceptionally well. Need for Speed do tend to always do well because I think they're, obviously it's a huge IP and it's a beloved IP. But again, that edgy feel, it's got underground street races versus cops, again, the one-liner of that is already cool. I think you then get into some of the games where the one-liners are a bit more complicated. and i think things like what is the the one line of grid it's a bit it's a bit harder to to grasp that um and therefore you can make a really good grid game that will do quite well but it's that had that required the game to be really good but like your time split as example earlier if a game comes out it is dead good and it gets really good reviews then you can i guess the future perfect do really well anyway this isn't about time splitters um yeah um i different world battle Yeah, a different world by then, yeah, yeah.

38:15Harinder Sangha: The simpler world. Need for Speed did do well every single year back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

38:20Mike Brown: They tended to always do well. I think that is the core promise of Need for Speed is does have broad appeal. For Clutch, for everything we do, it's a cinematic driving game. The one-liner is still a great looking game, has a load of beautiful cars, and you can drive around the South France and Monaco. And that one-liner, the way that you would describe it to your mates, is enough to make them go, oh, that sounds good. Can I have a look at that? And then once you've got that first little bit of interest, that's when you go and bring in everything else. It's got these really cool characters, nice stuff, nice gameplay, and there's all these kind of unique game modes where you do all these high-speed car chases.

38:55Mike Brown: And all that stuff is secondary. But the first thing we say to you is that it's beautiful, beautiful open world, beautiful cars, south of France. And I think that has very, very broad appeal. that's one that I think basically all men will be like beautiful cars in the south of France great it's got just a very very broad kind of first appeal and I think when you're trying to predict your other racing games I think if you came at it with that lens what is the one sentence, the one line, the first thing they say to you, if that's a bit weird or it's a bit confusing like I think let's Let's be mean.

39:38Mike Brown: All right. Test drive, unlimited, solar crown. What is it? What's the... Because it's drive around Hong Kong. It doesn't have the same... Hong Kong's cool, but I don't think it has the same holiday vibe that you just want to... I bloody love to go drive around Hong Kong. No one said that. It's not got the same vibe as Forza Horizon 6, where it's like, do you want to drive around Japan? Bloody yes, I do. You don't innately have the want to go and drive around Hong Kong in the same way that you would Japan. And therefore, that makes that game's job a little bit harder to go and find an audience.

40:16Mike Brown: Screamer is another example where it's a really interesting, fun game. I actually quite like Screamer, but the one line is confusing. It's hard to understand what the first grab of you is.

40:28Harinder Sangha: But I even had the problem with F1 games. I know part of it was linked to the season, how exciting the actual F1 season was. But one year it would be like the biggest game, and the next year it's a shadow of what it did before. I have some opinions on that as well. That's surprising, doesn't it, Chris? He's got an opinion.

40:46Mike Brown: So F1, I'll give you two opinions on this, which are nothing to do with any games I work on. So this is just my opinions as an external observer. Sometimes attaching a big IP like that, you think you're doing it to expand audience, but it doesn't necessarily do that because in order to be a person that's going to go buy a Formula One game, you have to be really somebody that watches Formula One broadcast on TV. There's no casual passerby gamer who doesn't really bother with Formula One that's going to go, I will get the Formula One game though. And I think somewhere that we saw this was when Dirt became WRC, where Dirt, longstanding IP, had peaks and troughs, but a decent game that's had some big hits in there.

41:32Mike Brown: and actually as an IP can reach a casual audience because if like me when you were a kid you played a lot of Sega Rally or if it was V-Rally or if it was Colin McRae whatever like game it was that you'd kind of seen of that genre at some point in your life that is a thing that could go I don't mind a rally game now and then I could go and pick up a rally game but as soon as you touch the WRC license it's now a bit serious and it's like well I don't really watch WRC on TV I don't really know who the drivers are or what the teams are anymore. It all seems a bit serious in its presentation. And so suddenly the audience for that actually shrinks to just the people who watch WRC on TV versus the people that played one of the Colin McRae games on the PS2 when they were a kid.

42:15Mike Brown: And a taxing IP can actually tighten the audience rather than expand it, even though you'd think the opposite is true. And yeah, I think for F1, it's a bigger IP than WRC, obviously. But I do think it's, am I currently watching it on the TV? and that's going to be the thing that is going to happen first before I then go and pick up the game. And if it's an exciting season you might have more people watching the TV. It's interesting, I went

42:38Harinder Sangha: to, one of my first ever press trips was to a WRC race basically and I was there for a couple of days and it was amazing. I think it was Milestone that was publishing it was releasing the game back then, had the license then, but back then Dirt was the bigger IP that was the big rally game so maybe you're right. Basically I was agreeing with you is what I was doing.

42:57Mike Brown: It's interesting, it's It's somewhat counterintuitive that you think attaching a brand to it is getting you a bigger audience, but in some cases it can have an opposite effect.

43:07Harinder Sangha: I'm conscious of the time. There's a big long answer here. I love it. How big is it at Maverick now? What's the latest with the studio? Yeah, so we're around 140 people. Wow. So, yeah, we are a big old studio. October last year we moved into our our new custom-built studio which we're very proud of it's a really nice space people seem to like come to the studio so that's a good thing and so yeah we probably would have spent less on it if

43:35Mike Brown: we've known that Amazon would have dumped us two months later

43:41Harinder Sangha: we didn't so we've spent the money now yeah I spent the money but yeah it's been worth it yeah yeah and is it is everyone internally or are you doing the trendy thing and doing a lot of outsourcing and stuff like that? So we have been. We've worked with a number of outsource partners throughout the project actually to make sure that we don't... I know we're a big team now, but we don't want to be a 300 person team because that comes with its own headache with having that bigger team. So we will always work with the right partners. We've had some successes, we've had some not so successes with that, but we work with Flix.

44:15Harinder Sangha: We've worked with Flix quite a lot. They've been quite embedded in our team. And I think that is where it works really well, where the outsource is almost part of the embedded team and they work in on a day-to-day basis as much as they possibly can. So they're on our teams, they're looking at our DevOps and they're completely... A lot of people here would not know whether they were permanent members of the team or part of an outsourcer. And that is where it works really well. I mean, obviously, I have some experience working at an outsourcer. So I've seen where it can work well and where it doesn't.

44:48Harinder Sangha: And I do think the smaller outsource teams where you can have that ability to take the right people across the board, I think that works really well.

44:56Mike Brown: With Flix in particular, there is a benefit to proximity as well. We're in Warwick, they're in Birmingham. On a global industry scale, that's the same place. And so they are able to just be on site, be in the studio and they're in the same time zone.

45:11Harinder Sangha: It's a popular conversation on the show at the moment. Your studio was set up in 2022, so it's a little different. Well, a lot of studios that are setting up today, they're going, right, we're going to have a core team of 30 and we're going to do the whole Hollywood model of bringing people in and then scaling up and scaling down and we don't need to because they're outsourced and things like that. And the fear, I think, the industry is, particularly the Western industry, is going to be a lot of outsourcing to a place like India and China where it's cheaper and that kind of stuff. But oddly, you've just said the same thing as when I interviewed Fuse about Star Wars where actually they're one with people that are closer.

45:41Mike Brown: There probably are times where it makes sense to go with the cost-saving efforts in the East. But games are really, really hard to make. And to make a good game is really, really difficult. And things constantly go wrong, and you constantly have to work through complicated problems. And there is a benefit to doing that with people who have been in the industry a long time and have made a lot of games and have been through a lot of these struggles that you're facing. Now, that's not to say those people can't be in Pune in India. They can, but there aren't as many of them over there as there are in the UK that have been making games for as long as video games have been getting made.

46:18Mike Brown: And when you're working with a lot of the outsource partners here, you're speaking to people that have themselves shipped eight to ten games. And I think that, yeah, you could do it cheaper somewhere else, but there is real value to working with people that have got either recent or historic experiences that can bring to bear. And that definitely is true for Flix that you talked about there. those are guys that just add real real value which I don't think you could get that from a newer company offering cheaper services elsewhere.

46:45Harinder Sangha: Certain markets are good at certain types of games and UK is very good at making racing games. From the very beginning this is what British game developers make so there's an element of well that's where you would necessarily go to look for that kind of talent whereas maybe if you were making a game in an you know making an RPG you might go hey let's see who we can partner with in Eastern Europe. Yeah. The one thing I will say as well, when we set out, we were quite ambitious about what we wanted to do. So we did hire, I think we were quite a bit fortunate really early on. We attracted some really amazing and talented senior people.

47:23Harinder Sangha: So we had them. We didn't want to be a studio that we're still making the same game. We haven't shipped our game seven years on, eight years on. We wanted to make sure we got this out because it doesn't matter all the good we're doing as a studio, you're only as good as your last game. And we do now and we need to get that out as quick as possible, really. So I think had we outsourced larger parts of it, I'm not sure we would have got to where we needed to as quickly as we had as well. So I think that I think that's a key factor. So with outsource, I do think it depends on you as a studio, where you are in your studio life, where you are in the project cycle as well.

47:57Harinder Sangha: I mean, we've come to because of where we are, we've come to an end of a lot of those outsource relationships that we had. just because we're almost done, really. So we're ambitious as a studio, so I think we will continue working with the right outsourcers and not grow hugely more than what we are now. But yeah, it's always about finding the right people that the team can work with as well. Yeah. I did have a few other questions, but I'm well out of time. Where would you like to see Maverick in, I'm going to say 10 years, because game development cycles are a lot longer than five. Well, it can be.

48:31Harinder Sangha: Where would you like to see Maverick in 10 years? I want us to be a studio that people admire. I want us to be a place where people don't just apply for the role on the website and think, oh, right, I'm just going to sit back and wait. I want people to feel like, God, they've just got such incredibly talented people there. What do I need to do to get a job at Maverick? And so we're constantly attracting the right people. So I want to make sure that Clutch is all going. Well, we'll probably end Clutch four or five. Who knows?

48:58Mike Brown: Let's not announce the sequels for sure.

49:01Harinder Sangha: But I want Clutch to be up there with one of, you know, a reputable IP. Maybe we're working on Project 2 by then.

49:08Mike Brown: Hopefully we're on Project 2. Well Project 2, not Clutch 2. Oh right, right. Not Clutch 2, as in a second, yeah, something else. Right, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would aspire for us to, I think a lot of your framing around that age is probably thinking about how game developers see us. I would want gamers to consider us one of, if not the best game developer in the world. I think that's kind of... 10 years I'd want to be in that. There is no award or league table that determines that, but it is a thing that does get discussed. People are saying it now about Insomniac, right? That is a thing that I think is big in gamer discourse now.

49:42Mike Brown: Is Insomniac actually the best studio out there? And they might be, actually. They might be. I want us to be in that level of discourse. And that's kind of where I'm shooting for.

49:55Harinder Sangha: I don't know whether you know this, Chris, but our mission statement in the studio, and it has been from the start, is we will be the world's number one studio celebrated for our exceptional team, vibrant culture and iconic games. So maybe that tells you where we'd like to be in 10 years' time. Yeah. Can I say that I interview people across the world and they've all got slightly different. I always love how matter of fact and quite blunt, in a way, European game developers are. I love how ambitious American game developers are. British game developers are relatively like they could have a massive hit and they go yeah I did alright but I talked to you Mike and you give the it's just different than what I'm expecting Deluded, insane Well Can you imagine what it's like partnering with him on a day to day basis but I'd like to think we complement each other quite well even in the way that I think I was just thinking as you were saying what your response was because we've quite often said is, and you know this, Chris, about me, is the thing that I've always set out to do, I want to make the industry a better place.

50:58Harinder Sangha: What we do matters. I want it to have an impact in the industry. I want people to learn good practice of here and take that on into other places in the industry. And for you, it's always about games first.

51:09Mike Brown: Yeah, I think to touch on what you've said there, Chris, something that I've found throughout my career really is the first step on achieving, like really remarkable, sometimes potentially impossible things is just saying you're gonna do it saying you're gonna do it and meaning it and i'm not gonna go into the details of it because um it touched on a bunch of stuff that my friends at playground uh were involved in but time and again um over there i would just say right this is we're gonna do this thing and on saying it sounds mad and then two later when you've done it, it feels great. And I do think that people generally, we hold ourselves back because you don't want to sound stupid by saying you're going to be the world's number one studio.

51:57Mike Brown: It's stupid. But if you say it with conviction, you believe in, and then the thought that follows that is, well, how are you going to do that? What would you need to do to actually make that real? And then do you know what, the ball's rolling, it's happening. Like you may not get there but the alternate is like going well we'll just see how we get on yeah hopefully it'll be all right hopefully we'll still be going um instead you say no we're going to be the best in the world and then the the thing that happens then is you start to think about and talk about well how'd you make that happen and someone's going to do it someone's going to be the best

52:26Harinder Sangha: all right yeah let's have a go this is somewhat disconnected to what you just said but i look at playground for instance and they are the crown jewel and xbox game studios right they're the biggest performing the most consistent game developer yeah i'd argue they're not the most famous one. Some of the names that get punted around, who wants to keynote this event? Nobody's mentioning the leaders of Playground. I'm like, they're out of the Xbox studios. They're the ones that delivered fraud consistently. I always use that as an example of, I don't know, maybe it's just a slightly more self-deprecating, less ego way.

52:58Mike Brown: But I don't know. I didn't really. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, well, knowing those leaders as I do, like two out of three, I just don't really like to impress. No. I imagine you'll see a lot of Ralph in the coming months.

53:11Harinder Sangha: Yeah, sorry. I've sort of devailed. Mike H, thank you so much. I love the story. I like the way you've ended up. You've been given a good start, I guess, in terms of having a game. There's not too much risk in it. And it's looking good. The feedback I'm hearing is really positive.

53:25Mike Brown: Yeah, it's that good, the game. You should try it, Chris.

53:27Harinder Sangha: Give us a wishlist. Well, thank you so much for your time. And say, good luck. Thank you very much, Chris. Good to speak again. Bye-bye. well that's it for today's episode of the game business show nice to hear from a new ambitious studio the game does look very good as you'd expect from the forza horizon folks we'll be back with more news analysis insight and interviews in the days and weeks ahead of course to make sure that you don't miss any of our big interviews any of our big stories you can head to the gamebusiness.com and put in your email address and you'll get a newsletter at least three times a week it's definitely worth it you should give it a go it's actually free we do have a paid tier as well it'd be nice to become if you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber please do it supports all of this but that's it for me today until next time thank you for tuning in