Simon Lockerby has gone from making YouTube videos about Raid: Shadow Legends to directly competing with Plarium by making his own squad RPG.
His debut game, Godforge, is very much cut from the same cloth as Raid: Shadow Legends, and is targeting the exact same player base. Lockerby set up game studio Fateless with friend Dan Francis and Hisham Saleh after building a large, high-value audience through his YouTube channel and Raid: Shadow Legends fansite hellhades.com.
The site grew quickly by offering news and tools with which Raid players can optimise their builds. Later, through sponsorships and memberships, it turned into a fulltime job for Lockerby and Francis. Increasingly, its community started asking them if they’d ever make a game themselves. So they did, enlisting the help of Saleh, the former CEO of indie studio Skeleton Hand.
It has escalated quickly from there – Fateless now employs around 70 staff and has raised over $14m in funding from both the hellhades.com community and other angel investors. And with its debut title Godforge it is now targeting the very same community that plays – and spends alot of money – in Raid: Shadow Legends.
“We’re trying to really evolve the genre to a next stage, rather than completely change it,” Lockerby tells us. He says that Godforge has even deeper character and equipment systems than in Raid, and his team is trying to evoke the community feel of playing an MMO through the game’s live events and group boss battles.
“A lot of our players are ex-MMO and World of Warcraft players, but they don’t have the time to play those games anymore,” Lockerby continues. “So that’s one of the levers that we’re trying to pull here – really fun, immersive battles, but where your friends and your allies actually make a difference.”
A separate intended point of difference for Godforge is the depth of its characters and storytelling, something inspired by some games like Etheria Restart and Summoner’s War.
Godforge is on course to be released in early access early next year, says Lockerby, who expects the cost of UA to be reduced “dramatically” as Fateless has already built a large community of high-spending players seeking exactly this kind of game.
“We know we have to grow massively beyond our community to be able to be successful as a company and as a game,” Lockerby continues. “It’s really a massive snowball that we’re pushing off the cliff here, but in terms of our starting point it’s almost like a massive unfair advantage that we’ve got this many players already waiting to play the game who are super keen on what we’re doing.”
Lockerby adds that while of course Godforge will cater to that audience of Raid: Shadow Legends big spenders, there will be plenty for free players to do too. “We know that we’ve got a good percentage of these bottom of the funnel players, these big spenders, and some of them have spent insane amounts of money on the game, honestly,” he adds.
“There’s a big free to play community within the group, and that’s super important as well. We’ve deliberately got things like normalised modes, where skill and knowledge matter, and actually, how much money you spent with the game is completely irrelevant….part of my ethos is, yeah, of course, we’re going to need to make money as a business, but we don’t really want the same predatory feel to some of the initiatives and the events in-game.”
