Warren Spector has been making games for more than 40 years. But he’ll acknowledge that the market is really tough right now, and that’s one of the reasons why OtherSide Entertainment and Megabit Publishing launched Thick As Thieves last week for just $5.
I did an interview with Spector and game director Jeff Hickman at OtherSide Entertainment and I asked them about pricing for the stealth-action heist game. It’s a small indie title but it has a spiritual legacy from the Thief games (which Spector pioneered).
You can play solo or with a partner in co-op multiplayer. It has a four-hour campaign, and so it seemed like a surprisingly low price for this kind of content from a veteran team.
Hickman said the team figured it had something special with the gameplay, but it was also small in scope. When he joined the team, there were two thieves, two maps, six pieces of gear, and 16 contracts. It’s playable and fun, with deep but not wide gameplay. To get the game out without a ton of funding, the team pulled back a larger co-op experience. They created solo and co-op and then decided to get it out and then listen to what players want.
“That’s where this whole idea of doing this early launch, low price point and small game,” Hickman said. “But we wanted to get it into the players hands and see what they had to say about it. Do they love the rection we’re going, and can we pick their brains about the kind of things they want to see in the game.”
Hickman added, “So for us, this is about giving people a great value. We don’t want to charge so much if people feel this is a small game. It’s a start and we want to build on it. We hope the price brings as many people in as we can get.”
Spector added, “That was certainly our thinking and our plan, getting the game in players hands, finding out what worked, what didn’t, so we can actually move forward with some knowledge, as opposed to what I’ve always done. This is all new to me. So luckily, we have folks like Jeff who have experience with it.”
Spector said he has old-fashioned roots where you finish a game, put in a box, real or virtual, and hold your hands together and pray that it’s a good value for players.
“I like to think I’m an old dog learning new tricks. This is something new to me, and it seems so obvious and self evident that it’s the right way to go to engage your audience ahead of time, and so that’s what we did. It’s a low price point that went along with the the narrow but deep gameplay,” Spector said.
He added, “And the thing that people may not realize is there’s even more there than I think Jeff was was hinting at. The games that Paul Neurath and I have made, in line with the mission of OtherSide Entertainment, is to provide deep replayability.”
He said players can take that those those missions and those contracts and those characters, and mix and match them, and depending on how you work together, depending on how you work solo, depending on how you interact with the world, depending on what tools you you use to build your character, the game is going to change.
It’s not unlike Deus Ex, another Spector classic game, in that respect.
“I had a friend who was not a gamer tell me he has played the game seven times,” said Spector. “I had one guy at GDC corner me and tell me played it 63 times. I pushed him on it and he convinced me he really did. The reality is there is a huge opportunity for replay. So it’s as many hours of play as your imagination will allow you to play.”
Hickman said he believes in under-promising and over-delivering.
“We’re really doing it,” he said. “We only have two maps, but every map, every gameplay session, has three levels of difficulty. And every single map has, depending on how you want to add it up, the variance in security, in guards, in access and exit points, in mission types, in the gear you bring. The amount of replayability and randomization in those levels is immense.”
I noted that the market seems different now and player demand has changed. I noted that Last Flag was a $20 multiplayer-only capture the flag game, but it didn’t do well despite an aggressively low price and a lot of replayability. The market is signaling support for this kind of aggressive pricing, I noted.
“I think you’re probably right, Dean,” Hickman said. “I’m no super-powered expert on trends in the marketplace, but I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I pay attention, and I do think there’s something about PC games, especially on Steam, where you’re seeing saturation.”
He noted that the key is to have a good game as foundation.
“Getting seen is a hard thing to do. And I think that takes a couple of different things. A good game is always the foundation, right? If you don’t have a good game, you might as well f*** off. Our game is bug free, has an interesting premise, it has good production values and it has a kind of special sauce that makes it fun,” Hickman said. “But the market is challenging and so you have to respond with pricing like this.”
Hickman said it’s important for the company to raise its profile and get people talking about how inexpensive the title is.
“It’s a super fun game with high production quality for five bucks,” he said. “If we can get people into it, they will play and get more people into it.”
Spector said the team did a lot of research and found the right price point for the depth of play that they’re delivering.
“If we had gone much higher, our odds of reaching that large audience would have gone down,” he said. “And you’ve got to have something worth replaying.”
Spector said the team has the ability to come up with more content, but a lot will depend on the release and how it’s received.
“We’re not making any promises,” Spector said. “We have some plans, but that’s not something that will happen next week or next month.”
As for what is entertaining about the game, Spector said it is built around the interaction with the other player.
“You’ll watch jaded developers play, and they’ll be laughing and patiently cursing. Players find joy. One of the things we wanted to do was multiplayer,” Spector said. “It was the next logical step for the kinds of games that we’ve been making. But the other thing was we wanted to honor Thief without recreating it. And one of the defining characteristics of thief the original games was this weird staccato rhythm of play that involved a lot of sitting in the dark, looking, waiting, waiting some more and still waiting until you go, go, go, go, go. And we talked about this as an action stealth game. And if you watch people play or play yourself, you’ll see that the team nailed that.”
He added, “How do we make a Thief game that isn’t all about waiting?”
Spector credited Hickman’s arrival about a year ago that the team figured out how to do this.
“There’s a fine balance between action and observation and knowledge and planning. It’s all kind of come together. That’s my favorite thing. The the pacing is is going to appeal to the audience,” Spector said.
Hickman said co-op is the high point of the fun, but the interaction with other players adds an emergent behavior, where players don’t behave as expected. That’s where the fun emerges, Hickman said.
I had to ask if they tried to get a license for the Thief name. They talked once, but it didn’t work out.
The game is entirely playable solo, and your play style matters. You can create a unique experience that is entirely yours, Spector said.
“If you want to play the traditional Thief way, the game does support that. If you want to play as a run and gunner, you can do that too. You better be really good. And you can play low and slow.”
While Hickman joined a year ago, the game has been in production and development for more than three years. There was a lot of experimentation around the PvP mode. The team had about 20 developers and maybe 30 with contractors.
Spector said the team found its footing as it moved from PvP to co-op, he said. In the testing, players weren’t playing the way the devs expected.
“If it had been obvious, we would have started there. But it became obvious as we watched people play,” Spector said.