Playdemic founders Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby are back with ForthStar, a new mobile game studio based in Manchester, UK.
The new outfit is mostly self-funded, but it has also secured a $10m investment from Griffin Game Partners. Gouge and Rigby have already assembled a core team of 14 ex-Golf Clash staffers from Playdemic, who are currently trialling a four-day week. The team plans to unveil its debut game in 2025.
This is the fourth new studio Gouge and Rigby have set up together, hence its name. They sold BattleMail to Mforma in 2002, Rockpool Games to Eidos/Square Enix in 2007 and later Golf Clash maker Playdemic to Warner Bros and then EA for $1.4bn.
“We’re heads down doing two things,” Gouge told us. “One, we’re building out all our tools and tech, so we’re putting in place all of the infrastructure you need to run a full service publisher. And the other piece of work is heads down prototyping, so lots of test-and-kill. We probably killed three or four things already and we’ve got something now that we’re really excited about, but whether that gets to see the light of day we’ll have to see.”
And though there’s a fair amount of doom and gloom around in mobile currently, Gouge is confident that there are plentiful opportunities out there for new studios like his. He says the emergence of Second Dinner’s Marvel Snap and Dream Games’ Royal Match as inspirations.
“I don’t think that the market itself is in poor health,” he tells us. “If you look at it relative to where we were two or three years ago, yes, it might be harder, but it’s still an incredibly exciting marketplace…given the experience we’ve had, the knowledge we’ve got, the people that we have around us and the scale of the market, I’m still convinced that there’s a big opportunity there.”
“It’s interesting to note that when we were developing Golf Clash, that was also against the backdrop of mobile being a challenging place and not a good idea…”
There’s a long way to go until ForthStar releases its first game, but Gouge adds that his new studio won’t necessarily be playing in the same action-sports space this time around.
“We tried some things in sports, but I think we’ll land somewhere else,” he says when talking about the studio’s current prototypes. “But it’ll be somewhere that has that same characteristic – something that people understand, and that’s got a ruleset that doesn’t have to be taught – something you’ll find familiar but hopefully pleasantly surprising and engaging.”
