I have a special little article to share with everyone today! TactiCon was a great event recently: a collaboration between Hooded Horse and Firesquid: you can check out my coverage from clicking on the links below. It was an enjoyable time and I hope they do another one soon.
So I’ve talked to the CEO of Hooded Horse on and off for about a year: I first spoke to Tim during E3 2021 while in the Falling Frontier Discord. Timothy Bender has done great work with his publishing house, focusing on awesome strategy games. They’ve taken a good number of teams under their wing, and 2023 in particular is shaping up to be a big year for these guys. I’ve always respected MicroProse as another strategy publisher, but Hooded Horse look set to match them. I was able to grab Tim from his busy schedule for a short interview, and I hope you enjoy a little insight behind what it takes to be a games publisher!
Thanks! The primary factor is that there is something for a group of players to love about the game. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command is of course dramatically different from Clanfolk, but both games have elements involved that players can really fall in love with.
I’d probably be a bad person to give advice on that unfortunately. There’s a lot of steps of learning, trial and error and such that the developers we’ve worked with have gone through, but I’m not very qualified to speak on that.
Ah that’s a good qualification! I do end up getting too busy to play at times. I’ll exclude our own games to avoid sounding like I’m just trying to promote them. I like traditional roguelikes a lot, probably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup most of all: https://crawl.develz.org/ . I recently had a great deal of fun playing Vagrus: https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/Vagrus__The_Riven_Realms/
It’s wonderful to be able to play a small part in helping developers. Creating a game is an enormous achievement – one that we never come close to in publishing itself – but getting to help these works of art find a larger audience is a great thing.
We’ll continue finding great games and developers to partner with!