As Dispatch approaches its first anniversary, its makers at AdHoc are putting their foot to the gas pedal to keep the momentum going.
Today, October 22, marks the first anniversary of the initial release of Dispatch, AdHoc’s popular episodic superhero workplace comedy adventure game. To mark the occasion, the studio is releasing a major content drop for owners of the game’s Deluxe Edition including Storyboard Mode, a new mode that allows users to play the entire game while experiencing its cinematic scenes in their original storyboard form. AdHoc is also releasing two new commentary tracks for each episode of Dispatch featuring insights from contributors across the studio’s team, from directors and writers to UI programmers and sound engineers.
“As fans ourselves of behind-the-scenes stuff of film and other games, we thought this was a really unique opportunity,” said AdHoc chief operating officer and co-founder Nick Herman in an interview with GamesBeat. “That’s something that only our game could do, because most games don’t have everything entirely storyboarded.”
Today’s Dispatch content update is among a raft of updates announced by AdHoc to commemorate the game’s first anniversary. By the end of the year, AdHoc plans to bring Dispatch to users across iOS and Android devices, joining players across PlayStation and PC — the game’s original launch surfaces last October — and Nintendo, Xbox, and Luna. AdHoc also announced today that Dispatch had crossed the five-million-player threshold, with Herman crediting the game’s multi-platform launch strategy for its continued growth.
“We’re not a mobile game company. This is a thing where we’re putting it out there, and if nobody buys it, that would be unfortunate, but it’s also not the end of the world,” Herman said. “So, we’re doing a weird thing. The first half of the game is free on these devices, just because we believe that the more you play, the more invested you become.”
AdHoc also announced a new line of physical merchandise designed and sold in-house, representing an expansion of the licensed merchandise business that the studio dabbled in during the early days of Dispatch, which Herman said had resulted in the sales of some items that were “lower quality than we wanted.”
“With the anniversary, we’re putting out a bunch of new stuff. It’s testing some new ideas on how we produce our merch — who are partners are, and all this stuff,” Herman said. “It’s maybe boring to folks who just want a cool T-shirt, but it does feel weirdly related [to AdHoc’s broader journey] because it is stuff we’re doing in-house and handling ourselves.”
Self-publishing is an important part of AdHoc and Dispatch’s story. The studio initially worked with a publishing partner for the first half of Dispatch’s development, but was required to self-fund the second half of the project after the partner decided to pull out from the deal with relatively short notice, sustaining itself during this period with projects like The Wolf Among Us 2.
“As part of our journey as a publisher, we kind of got really lucky initially, where we made a game that people liked,” Herman said “Basically, if you’re not doing that, then it doesn’t matter how hard how hard you publish — it’s not going to make up for the the fact that the game sucks.”
AdHoc is also announcing today that it will be partnering with Lost in Cult to create a commemorative art book about Dispatch featuring interviews with members of the game’s development team, as well as voice actors like Aaron Paul.
“We worked with them to create our vinyl, which we’re really happy with the final product there,” Herman said. “So, I think this is also something fans are really going to dig.”