![]() With 60 Seconds!, Robot Gentleman has built success of its own on a much smaller scale, granted, but still a lot to manage for a a team of just three people at the time of the game's launch. I knew I would prefer to go on my own sooner or later, but if there was anything that pushed me towards this it was my experience at CD Projekt." It's not a pretty good company to work for at least, it wasn't when I was there, and that's why I decided to leave. It's a pretty good place to learn a lot, because the people are fantastic. "It's a pretty good company to have on your CV. Back in the day, when I started, there was 50 people on The Witcher 3 team, and overall it was something like 100 people including management and all the marketing stuff. Some people enjoy being part of a big studio that does very ambitious and very big projects that take a few years. #Markplier reflect studio full"Lionhead was an amazing studio, full of talented people, and most of these people had worked there for over ten years" "I went in, on my first day, expecting to go to the Cyberpunk team, and the lady at the desk directed me to The Witcher 3 team," he says, noting that the company was just about to expand rapidly to fulfill its ambitions for the game. However, if Lionhead was an invigorating experience that made him consider starting his own studio, CD Projekt was a chastening one that left him with no doubt about the road ahead. When he left after just over a year, he was increasingly confident that he had enough experience and insight to start his own studio.īy the time Gotojuch started his second job in the industry Robot Gentleman already existed, but the chance to work on Cyberpunk at Poland's most successful developer, CD Projekt Red, appeared to be the perfect way to fund his own projects. #Markplier reflect studio how toGotojuch looks back on Lionhead as an "ideal place" to start as a game developer, a place where someone could learn both technical skills and a sense of how to build an inclusive internal culture. There was a very, very strong core team, with a very clear identity, and all of it centred around Peter. It was an amazing studio, full of talented people, and most of these people had worked at Lionhead for over ten years. Everyone felt like they contributed, even though it was big. ![]() "It contributed to the creativity both from top to bottom and from the bottom up. It was a "chaotic" place in how it was run, he says, but chaotic in a good and broadly beneficial way. ![]() It was 2009, and Peter Molyneux was still very much at the centre of the company. Gotojuch had previously worked as a gameplay programmer at Lionhead, that great and now sadly defunct British studio. ![]() Robot Gentleman was founded at the very start of 2012, but more as an idea than an official entity. "It was survival money," adds Juliusz Zenkner, a longstanding friend and collaborator of Gotojuch's who became the second member of Robot Gentleman's team. We were hoping for 10,000 because we calculated that it would keep us afloat it wouldn't necessarily recoup our costs, but it would give us momentum, and maybe an audience so that we could create a second game." "When you start a company you feel like you need to be ready for failure in case something goes wrong, but the thing is, you also need to be ready for success. According to Gotojuch, with as many as 200 sales a day more than two years after launch, there has never been an incentive to do so. It carries a premium price on each of those platforms, and while that price has been discounted in the past, it has never been included in a bundle. #Markplier reflect studio macIt can also be challenging"Īs we sit down to talk at Poznan's Games Industry Conference, 60 Seconds! is closing in on 700,000 copies sold across PC, Mac and mobile. "When you start a company you feel like you need to be ready for failure, but you also need to be ready for success. "We hoped to sell 10,000 copies in a year, which was the optimistic number of sales for an indie." ![]() "60 Seconds was a massive success that we did not anticipate," says Dominik Gotojuch, the studio's founder and both its creative and technical director. Such is the case with Robot Gentleman, a Polish studio with a flair for theatrical branding (its team are always on message, dressed in steampunk themed outfits at industry events) and an enviable track record of one release and one surprisingly large hit: 60 Seconds!, a witty and precise Cold War-era survival game, in which the player must shepherd a family through the dropping of a nuclear bomb and its aftermath. For any new indie studio, the correct way to navigate the path from total obscurity to financial success is akin the games industry's very own theory of everything knowledge so valuable that people work tirelessly to acquire even the smallest piece, and yet it remains hidden - even to those who somehow find themselves at the path's destination. ![]()
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