Velan Studios is expanding its capabilities with new game:
https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/i...me-mattel.html
From the article: “Troy video game developer Velan Studios' next opportunity is on the horizon as it prepares to sunset one of its own titles.
Velan Studios is launching Hot Wheels: Rift Rally in partnership with the toy company Mattel in March. It's the studio's first foray into direct publishing.
At the same time, Velan announced that its Knockout City game would shut down its servers come June. The title will still be available on PC for gameplay on a private server, but Guha Bala, president of Velan, said the move is a strategic one to focus the team's talent on other projects coming down the pipeline this year.
Both moves are part of a longer-term plan for the studio, Bala said.
Hot Wheels: Rift Rally represents the first time Velan will launch a physical product on its own. Using Velan's patented remote-controlled mixed-reality technology, players can customize an RC car into 140 variations of Hot Wheels.
The game is a natural extension of what the studio accomplished with MarioKart Live Home Circuit, which was a crossover with hardware and augmented reality.
But MarioKart was published and distributed by Nintendo. With Hot Wheels, it will be Velan's responsibility, an important new capability for the studio, Bala said.
"It gives us our ability to control more of the entire value chain for what our product is," Bala said. "The financing is internal, marketing is internal, the brand management is internal, the analytics stack are internal. So all of these are services that are outside of the core development area and come under publishing."
As Velan prepares to launch Hot Wheels: Rift Rally, one of its early titles is coming to an end.
Knockout City, a competitive multi-player dodgeball game published with Entertainment Arts, represented what the studio has aimed to do since it formed, Bala said: Take creative risks that larger companies can't. It stood out as an e-sport that didn't involve guns.
"We founded Velan Studios to take creative risks that were really impossible for us to take within a larger enterprise. And there's a real paradox: You think that the largest and biggest companies and the big balance sheets are the ones doing the super risky R&D. And it turns out, especially in entertainment ... the bulk of investment goes into existing franchises with the relative minority of investments going into really fresh new product lines," he said.
When the game first launched in May 2021 after years of development, it was a mid-price premium online game (meaning it retailed for about $30) — a successful model at the time the project began. But outside economic pressures forced the studio to make the game free to play, and to grow the game and its user base would require big changes.
Ultimately, the cost of those changes outweighed the long-term benefit, Bala said. The amount of revenue generated per user wouldn't exceed the cost of generating content for a while.
"That calendar is pushing further and further out. And so you say at some point, 'That risk factor is too high, what we need to do is something fundamentally different,'" he said.”