Dieter Schoeller, Managing Director and founder at Headup Games spoke at the recent Casual Connect Europe offered the lessons learned over the last seven years when it comes to publishing independent games, collaborating with young studios and successfully bringing the games of Headup Games to the market. Having built up all pillars of distribution, from dinosaur retail business to Steam to mobile to digital console, Dieter shared an insight into best practices and the biggest failures encountered along this path through concrete case studies and subjective insights. One of these insights was: “I see a great future for mobile premium games if we can establish a platform like Netflix.” Tune in below for more.
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Dieter Schoeller, Managing Director of Headup Games, looks for a games with edge. “I personally don’t like to publish games which are soft and do not hurt anyone,” Dieter says. “But generally we aren’t looking for anything specific, we prefer to see what developers come up with and then evaluate the potential of something fresh.”
And judging from Headup’s portfolio, whatever they’re doing is working. Headup has published genre-changing hits like Super Meat Boy, The Binding of Isaac, Terraria, Limbo, and more.
Part of Headup’s strategy is to give every title the same attention as other games in the portfolio, regardless of the project’s budget and scope.
“We try to polish out the uniqueness of each game to make the gamers understand that there is more to gaming than what they know from the big-budget titles,” Dieter says. “There should be a good subculture in gaming, and I wish to be part of this.”
Like most publishers they have a list of reasons ready for when people ask what publishers can do that developers can’t do themselves. “The customer is king, but sales are his queen. I feel the biggest challenge is always to call the right shots when it comes to pricing, distribution strategy and the question of visibility. Building up the right relations is key from my perspective, and it took several years to really pin down the right people to talk to from the major stakeholder channels.”
After graduating from law school, Dieter worked in several large gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Koch Media/Deep Silver and RTL/Bertelsmann. Dieter picked up good experience at those companies, but ultimately decided to found Headup and be part of projects from start to finish rather than working on only tiny pieces of much larger projects.
“Since I went through pretty much all main departments of publishing (PR, marketing, sales, biz dev), I was able to get a good picture of the basics in every area, enabling me to combine this knowledge into a good grasp of all aspects of the market,” Dieter says.
The Startup Life
Since founding Headup Games, Dieter has been enjoying things. It’s hard to pick a favorite aspect of the work, but Dieter says it’s enjoyable being part of the non-mainstream design process, nerding out with developers and “actually everything but Excel work. … But if I had to pick one specific thing it would be the close partnerships with the creative minds behind the games we publish, bringing so much energy and motivation to the table for everyone.”
There have been several moments to be proud of at Headup: Seeing titles launch and succeed, finding and nurturing new friendships, and being recognized for their work. Headup was awarded Best German Publisher in 2012 and 2013, an achievement they say was completely unexpected.
If Dieter were to credit the company’s success to anything, it would be honesty and transparency. “Don’t BS people,” Dieter says. “Keep it transparent, and most importantly, raise concerns early but on a non-personal level. Developers and publishers sometimes speak a very different language and it is important to always assume the best intention in everything the other party might say. After all both parties’ intention should always be to maximize a game’s success and exposure”
The startup life is, of course, busy. For Dieter, most free time is family time. “Managing a company while also trying not to miss your children’s early years is already a challenge,” they say.
The Appeal of Games
Dieter has been interested in games since childhood and technically entered the industry while in law school, editing for Quake 3 and Wolfenstein. Dieter believes games can be the perfect form of entertainment when well executed, containing interactive parts and passive parts, immersive and endless in possibility. Games can approach consumers on both technical and emotional levels.
Subjectively speaking, the story of a game doesn’t matter at all to Dieter. “Most important to me is the flow, perfect controls, and digging in deeper: An enjoyable endgame content. But this only applies to myself; the rest of my team are very diverse in their taste for gaming.”
Enter the world of Pixel Heroes and prepare yourself for a thrilling RPG/Roguelike experience like you have never seen before!
As for the future of gaming, Dieter sees at least a couple of good years for indies on console ahead. Everybody’s talking about VR, but they predict the technology will be hit in other areas and not so much in games. Gaming will move to a Spotify- or Netflix- style subscription model, Dieter believes. Whatever the future has in store, Headup will be watching closely for the opportunities that benefit the team members and their families the most.
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