Until late last year, Brighton studio Relentless Software had spent its entire seven year history bound by an exclusivity deal with Sony. During E3 week earlier this month, Relentless announced two new partnerships: one with Microsoft, that will see it develop several Kinect-compatible games, the first of which, Music In Motion, will be released through Kinect Fun Labs; the other with Chillingo, publisher of Cut The Rope and the original Angry Birds, who will handle distribution of Relentless' iOS debut, Quiz Climber, set for release next month. We spoke to company co-founder Andrew Eades to find out how restructuring has affected the studio and why it's so keen to work with another platform holder so soon after going solo.
How was your E3?
I really enjoyed it. I thought the industry had a bit more of a spring in its step than last year: I think people felt more positive generally. New hardware always helps with that anyway, but certainly I feel that we've got over the bump of last year - or certainly most of us have. The disruption of Facebook and mobile we've kind of come to terms with as an industry, so it felt a lot better and it seems like some of the money is coming back in. On the whole, it was good, but E3 is very much still about discs in consoles; the industry is always guilty of forgetting that it's more than that. If we want to be regarded as an entertainment industry then we've got to look beyond just consoles.
Did you come away with plans to work on the new hardware that was revealed?
No, not really. We're still thinking about it - I haven't had any hands on with the Wii U but I was intrigued by it. Secret information - something you know that the other players don't know - has always been a compelling game mechanic for us; if you think about card games, a lot of those games are based on the fact that you know what's in your hand and no-one else does, so we've always wanted to try that out and have prototyped games that assume that you have your own personal screen. So that was really interesting, but [at the moment] there's only one private screen per console. We'll have a look to see if there's anything unique we could do with it, but we're still focused on Kinect mainly, and iPhone, and other, more ubiquitous devices that are already available.
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Relentless co-founder Andrew Eades
You recently announced that you and co-founder David Amor had changed roles, with you heading up strategy and David the creative side. What brought that about?
It's really a crystallisation of our roles to make it more comprehensible to everyone, and give us some boundaries. We've worked together for over eight years now - if you count Computer Artworks it's nearly nine years. We're still both 50/50 shareholders and we still run the board, but we needed to divide our efforts a bit more than we have done previously. When we were exclusive with Sony, we could make every decision jointly, and debate it all, but in the world where we're independent we need to divide that effort a bit more. It's just a natural evolution of our roles.
Before, it was pretty simple: 'Our strategy is to make Buzz!.' Which doesn't require a great deal of conversation - we could both concentrate on the studio making the best games we could. As we looked at reorganising the company we realised we couldn't do it without looking at what our own roles were.
So when we came to do that earlier in the year we decided to establish a differentiation between the two roles, which I think is working really well for us. I mean, David is creating some brilliant output from the studio, and he doesn't need me to help on that. As much as I like to mess around with games and tell people what I think of them, it doesn't need both of us to do that. In terms of longer-term thinking, that is a full-time role for someone, so that's what we've decided to establish.
How has your day-to-day work changed since the end of your deal with Sony?
Working exclusively with Sony was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was we were working with the world's premier console maker in the PS2 days, on a massive franchise that we'd invented, so that wasn't that bad. And we were kind of treated like an internal studio. But at the same time, we weren't fully internalised, so we didn't really feel we had a seat at the table where decisions about our future were actually being made. And that became an increasing source of frustration: we know what we're doing and we've got something to add to that conversation, but because we're not fully internal we have no right to be at the table we wish we were at.
So, the natural thing is to say, well, let's go non-exclusive and see what that's like. And of course it was a lot harder than we imagined it could be, and if you were going to choose a year to quit your cosy exclusive arrangement with Sony, 2010 was probably not the best choice, because all the money just disappeared out of the game industry at exactly that point. But we got through it, we survived, we made some good deals. It was towards the end of 2010, rather than the middle when we hoped to do it, but we're on track, we're on plan, we've reorganised the whole studio to reflect our new focus and we've got some great products coming out.