Across the road from The Game Awards, in a car park featuring a couple of trailers and some plastic flamingos, sits the Racoon Logic team.
The developer behind the upcoming Revenge of the Savage Planet is demoing the title and conducting interviews with journalists as opposed to doing a big Game Awards trailer. It’s a very old school approach to PR.
“Just being part of the big show, you can get lost in the noise a little bit,” reasons creative director Alex Hutchinson.
“Doing this for us is more fun, and a bit easier. And I like to think we’re doing the last hurrah of the games industry I grew up with, which is… you get an Edge cover, you fly journalists in to talk to you in actual person… it feels like the end. We’re doing a physical version of this game with Maximum Games. That’s the industry I love. That’s how I want to do it. I don’t necessarily want to make a games-as-a-service title that costs $200 million, gets unplugged after a week and never gets played.”
As the industry ages, you would hope that there is an audience of slightly older games that would appreciate the classic approach.
“That’s our bet,” he adds. “We will find out next year if there are enough of us. People in their 40s… even if you have kids, you have more disposable income than you did in your 20s, but you have less time. So you might still want to play games, but I feel repressed by games that want me to play every week. I don’t want to. I want to spend time with the kids or to finish that house project.”
Hutchinson tells us that 2024, in contrast to what has been going on across the industry, has been a good one for the team at Racoon Logic.
“We were wise in that we didn’t grow a lot. We stayed about 30 people. We have money in the bank, we haven’t had to make any redundancies, we’re pretty stable… we have had to be serious in not growing the scope of the game, and not responding to requests from everybody. We’re just polishing now and looking forward to its release, and hopefully there is a market for it.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet, which arrives in May next year, is the follow-up to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, although because of various ownership situations, the team isn’t entirely sure how successful that first game was.
“We never saw numbers,” Hutchinson admits. “It was 505 Games and then we sold to Google, so we never saw numbers. But we have the player base, and last we saw around five to six million people had played it. Which is great… but that doesn’t mean they paid for it, because it was on Game Pass, it was on Epic Store, it was on everything. So we don’t know how many people bought it vs how many people played it.
“But it seems like enough people played it, and it’s back on Game Pass right now which is great for us. If we’re not going to make royalties from it, which we’re not as we gave that up to 505 to receive the rights back to the IP, then that’s all we want, more people to see and hopefully like it, and then want to buy this one.”
“I don’t necessarily want to make a games-as-a-service title that costs $200 million, gets unplugged after a week and never gets played”
Hutchinson has mixed feelings towards Game Pass and subscription services in general.
“It’s tricky and it’s unclear,” he says. “Game Pass works if you’re building an audience, and that’s the hardest bit. But then… if we’re doing that stuff, we want to make sure we have a $10 extra stuff pack and all that, to try and make sure we get some money. Because the amount [subscription companies] are paying has dropped precipitously over the last three years, which means it is not the deal that it was. And I very much worry about a future where everyone is on subscription services and expect content for free. I don’t think it’s served the music industry well at all, for smaller artists especially.
“But the worst scenario is that you’re not making any money and you’re not being paid. I’ve spent 20 years trying to make games that people will have an opinion on, whether that’s Army of Two or Spore or Assassin’s Creed 3 or this one… someone is going to say they hate it, and that’s okay as long as someone else loved it. But if people don’t even know the game you’re talking about… that’s the bad one.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet arrives during a highly congested 2025 release slate, with an array of games due to arrive throughout the spring and summer, presumably to get ahead of the expected launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 at the end of the year.
“We’re feeling pretty good,” Hutchinson says. “We’re tonally very different and distinct. I think the audience that likes us are not served by much a lot of the time. There is more coming out, with things like South of Midnight from Microsoft. So there is stuff. But the beauty of the game we’re making is that people can buy both. Whereas if it’s Concord or something, people buy one, and if they’ve got Overwatch, why would they buy Concord?
“With ours… even if they don’t buy us early on, they might do later. In AAA, you get this enormous week one, two and three, and then it depreciates significantly. If there’s DLC you get a bump, and you get a bump with a sequel, but it’s really all or nothing. But with our games, and other smaller finishable games, there is this steady, linear growth where people bookmark it and get to it eventually. I wouldn’t say we are optimistic that we’ll be huge off the bat. But the sort of game we’re making seems to age quite well. We had lots of people contact us when the last one went back on Game Pass, and that game’s four years old. So we’re cautiously optimistic that we can make it up over time.
“And it’s $40. It’s not a $70 game.”
“I very much worry about a future where everyone is on subscription services and expect content for free”
Racoon Logic is self-publishing the game for the first time, and Hutchinson says that the firm has reasonable expectations. The studio’s overall goal is to keep making slightly unusual fare. There’s no desire to create a mega hit.
“The industry is always in flux,” he continues. “It is always doing things and finding a way to survive. The joy for us is… we’re definitely going to do a third one. We’re in a good spot for that. But we want to keep going and be a studio that does weird flavoured things. A big company always wants you to go on and be a 100-million seller or whatever. We just want to be successful and make games that people come up to us and mention at shows.
“So the game has only done $100 million? Well, it only cost $5 million and there’s only 30 of us. That’s a good day.”
I enjoyed my time with Revenge of the Savage Planet. A mix of action, puzzles, platforming and fun traversal across colourful and ridiculous open areas. And it’s funny, too, with plenty of satirical references to the games industry. The villain is called Gunter Harrison, which is presumably a play on former Google games executive Phil Harrison [Hutchinson’s previous company was shut down by Google in 2021].
“Any similarity to anybody living or dead is purely incidental,” he laughs. “Look… subtlety’s overrated. We took the British approach to humour.”
In fact, the game’s overall tone reminded me of the sort of games UK developer Rare likes to make.
“There’s a bit of Rare,” Hutchinson says enthusiastically. “I’ll tell you this because it didn’t happen. We can have outfits in the game, and we said we can make a Conker outfit [from Rare’s 2001 comedy platformer Conker’s Bad Fur Day], which would be exclusive to the Xbox version. We didn’t want anything for it. The guy said it got way further than he thought it would, but eventually the answer was ‘no’. It’s a real shame.”
He concludes: “But generally, there’s not enough comedy in games. It’s a huge market segment, and I hate saying those words, in movies and books and TV and comics. But it is a fucking empty aisle in video games.”
