Ghost Ship Games has earned legions of fans and built a positive, creative community with its multiplayer shooter Deep Rock Galactic. The overwhelming positivity around the game has made such a name for itself that other indie developers have approached the Danish studio for advice on recreating its success. Now the studio is looking to use the skills it honed developing and maintaining its hit title to help other developers bring quality titles to market with a new publishing arm: Ghost Ship Publishing.
Game ZXC recently spoke to Ghost Ship Games co-founder and CEO, Søren Lundgaard, about the company's future in game publishing and development. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what is next for Ghost Ship Games?
A: I’m Søren Lundgaard. I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Ghost Ship. So I’ve been with the ship all six years and a bit more as it is now. During these six years, it’s all been about Deep Rock Galactic. It still is, internally. The game is now bigger and better than ever before.
When we’ve been out at conferences, wherever we meet developers, and locally here in Denmark, we’ve been approached by many indie developers. They really want to take the same Steam Early Access journey, community building, and all that. So they ask us for advice, but they also ask “Could we possibly published by Ghost Ship?” And we’re like “Okay, we don’t really have a publishing division, but maybe we should start one.”
So yeah. That’s how it started. The idea behind it, so now we’re taking some action on it. We’ve decided to start and see what happens.
Q: Is the title of the new vertical Ghost Ship Publishing? Ghost Ship Games Publishing?
A: For now, it’s Ghost Ship Publishing, but we are still discussing things like that. The logo and all that, but I think Ghost Ship Publishing is going to be the brand name. That’s what we are going for right now.
Q:How will the launch of this publishing vertical impact or change Ghost Ship Game's relationship with Coffee Stain Publishing/Embracer Group?
A: Not a lot. Deep Rock Galactic is published and will still be published by Coffee Stain. And we still have a really, really good—an exceptionally good relationship with Coffee Stain. We just had a call with them before this interview to further discuss how we can collaborate moving on.
I think they are even kind of proud that we are doing this now. I mean, I would be the same with some of the developers we end up signing with. If they end up self-publishing or even start their own business to spread the knowledge and help others get their games to the market, I would be really proud.
So I think that even though you can say that we might compete around some of the same types of games—they are also going for Steam Early Access releases and community-driven games—I don’t think that, in reality, we will compete because the market is pretty big out there. We’ll just collaborate and find out where the developers will get the best help.
Q: Can you elaborate on what inspired Ghost Ship to take the leap to start publishing games as well as developing them?
A: I think what we really want to do is actually try it out and see if our premise is true. What we’re saying is that we’re good at running a Steam Early Access game and bringing a game like that to the market. We really wanted to pass on that experience and have fun. I still have this feeling when we talk to developers that the knowledge we now have is worth a lot. It’s valuable to listen to and implement, so this was the next natural step. Let’s formalize these relationships. Let’s set up a publishing division under Ghost Ship, flow some money to these developers, and see if we can get some really awesome games to the market.
Q: Will Ghost Ship Games be self-publishing its own titles in the future? How do you think self-publishing will benefit the studio?
A: Whatever is coming out next from Ghost Ship could be published by Ghost Ship Publishing, but it could also be published by Coffee Stain if that makes sense. I think it will depend on what’s the best fit for the project. How we can reach the most players, or whatever constellation ends up being the best.
Self-publishing is an interesting subject, because when I am asked about publishing, like you have a publisher, like Coffee Stain. But we actually kind of self-published Deep Rock Galactic, like 90% of it. And Coffee Stain was totally cool with that, because that kind of helped them as well.
I think what we are also striving to do is to help get other developers in the self-publishing mindset because that is really needed when you are working with a community. It doesn’t really work when the publishers “get in the way,” so to speak. You really want the developers and the community—the fans—to be as closely glued together as possible, so I see us as more like a service publisher that can guide developers and show them they actually need to do some work here, and it’s to their own benefit to do so.
Q: Tell us more about these new titles. What genres are they, and what inspired them?
A: So first, I have to say that we’re not going to announce any of the titles on Thursday. We will wait with the announcement of the titles until March 2 when will have a live stream related to our Deep Rock Galactic five-year anniversary. And as a part of that live stream, we will announce Ghost Ship Publishing again, because most of our fans won’t really see what’s going on Thursday.
Then we will announce one or more of these new titles. We have three titles lined up, but we’re not sure if they are all “announce-able,” so to speak, in three weeks’ time. In terms of genre, they are all Steam Early Access titles. They are also… not necessarily co-op, but they are games where communities can easily talk and share experiences with these games. They are also definitely gamer’s games. They’re all hardcore games with a lot of deep gameplay in them. Not necessarily super big projects. Kind of smallish setups with teams of a handful of people.
Q: What drew you to those titles? Did you see something that reminded you of Deep Rock in them?
A: Not really. Well, one of them is leaning towards it a bit, and the other isn't. Well, it’s a bit hard to say something without saying something. If we see a game that is a true co-op game, an action game with a cool loop that you can keep expanding, then yes, that’s also true for Deep Rock, and we would love to engage with those developers. So, in some instances, yes, but in others, it’s other qualities.
Q: Do you have any estimation of when your maiden voyage in publishing will release?
A: We do believe at least one of these titles will release later this year. Probably be much later in the year, but within 2023. I think it is really important for us to get something out early. With Deep Rock, we’ve always believed that we need to get the game into the hands of the community, the fans, as early as possible, and respond to their feedback.
And so, we want to start sharing insights and tales of the game as soon as possible, and we will showcase playables at the end of the anniversary stream in three weeks. At least two of the projects are quite close to being able to be something fans can get their hands on.
Q: Will Early Access be a crucial part of your publishing arm?
A: I don’t think I will sit here and say that we will never sign a game that is going for a full, direct release. Because I think for some types of games, that is the right route. But I think we would strongly prefer games that are going for a Steam Early Access type of route, now and moving forward. Some of the other platforms might open up for more types of releases, but right now. we feel Steam is doing this the best.
Q: What should developers who want to work with you know?
A: We are looking for games that have what we are calling ‘flexible game design,’ meaning that it is the opposite of a linear narrative or puzzle game. So games that are built around systems that are endlessly expandable, where you can go deep and master them. And even after playing them for hundreds of hours, you can still discover new stuff and new layers to the games. In some ways, it sounds like those would be expensive games to create, but to us, it’s actually kind of the contrary, because when you create these systems cleverly, it just adds up and becomes bigger and bigger. That’s our experience with Deep Rock anyway. So flexible game design is one of the pillars.
The other pillar is games or teams that want to work with a community to get the game out. And that means they need to be open to feedback, criticism, and be able to implement that pretty fast into their product. That means we also like teams that are not too big. Because the larger the team, the slower they are able to turn around on these things. So those are some of the pillars.
On the business side, we would really like to push forward our own philosophy of consumer-friendly business models. So to begin with, we want premium games, and if we branch into other types of games, it will be because we have found those have a route to being consumer friendly.
Q: Do you think this quality of flexible game design is better suited to multiplayer games with emergent narratives, or is it possible to have a flexible, narrative-driven game?
A: Yeah. I mean, it’s not impossible to put in a lot of story, characters, or world-building, but it’s just not very friendly towards this community collaboration, openness, and Steam early-access approach to have a strict linear plot that can’t really be changed. Then that dictates too much, and it also turns the game into a consumable product. As soon as you’ve gone through the narrative once, there is little sense in doing it again, in most cases. But of course, you have some really excellent games out there that are quite high on what you could call narrative.
Like, you can say that Hades has a lot of storytelling, but it’s still endlessly repeatable. That shows that it’s possible to combine these things. Also, I think a really high-quality game like Returnal. Of course, that’s a huge production, but it also pushes the narrative envelope quite far, and it works. So I think it’s definitely possible, but if everything starts around a strict narrative, it’s going to be pretty difficult to work within the boundaries, or towards the goals that we want to achieve with this. So yes, those titles will be lower in our priority to look at for sure.
Q: Deep Rock Galactic has earned Ghost Ship Games a reputation for stellar multiplayer experiences, in part because of your emphasis on consumer-friendly business models. Can you expand on how that will play a role in your publishing?
A: Yeah, so I think empowering the community and making sure they can feel ownership in the products and encouraging positive feedback loops. So for Deep Rock especially, of course, we have our “Rock and Stone.” The shout inside the game is now starting to become infamous, and even spreading across Reddit and so on. We actually built this positive feedback into the design, and this is something we would of course help the teams that we are working with, especially those that design for co-op games.
We will help them understand the strength of these positive feedback loops. And that’s something we will pluck directly from Deep Rock because we did many of these quite deliberately, we learned from them, and now we feel we can pass them on with confidence.
Q: How is Ghost Ship expanding to facilitate this new publishing vertical?
A: Yeah, so in general Ghost Ship is slowly expanding. We are closing in on 35 people at the studio right now which is excellent, and not a lot compared to the size of the game and the success of the game. We will slowly keep expanding, growing by maybe five people per year. Some of those people we already hired this year to help on the publishing side. We're not going to build up a huge publishing setup where we can take like care of big productions or anything. We will work with smaller developers which also means that we can hopefully keep this so much smaller on our side. Again, for the whole agile approach, to be able to react fast and be in direct contact with the people we work with.
Q: How does Ghost Ship Games foresee its balance between game development and game publishing going forward?
A: Yeah, so the majority that works at Ghost Ship Games will still work hands-on on new games and existing games moving forward. We are developers and mostly all of our staff right now are developers, so they will do what they are best at, and that is developing games.
Of course, there will be some crossover stuff for people. Like, we have a marketing unit where they produce TikTok videos and trailers and so on. And they will, of course, be able to help on the publishing side as well. So we'll have some people that are experts at what they do, and they can go in and help on the publishing site. It will be—at least for a while—a rather fluid process and organization.
Q: In addition to the new slate of titles arriving, you mentioned that Deep Rock’s five-year anniversary is coming up. Do you have any information you can tease, or share about that?
A: Yes. The anniversary is for year five. We launched in February 2018. And so for that anniversary, we are going to release Deep Rock Galactic as it was when it launched five years ago. So that’s one thing we’ve been working on. We will also reveal a roadmap for what we will work on, or what we are actually already working on with Deep Rock Galactic. So there will be more news on that around our anniversary stream on March 2. I don’t have anything concrete I can announce right now, other than “there will be news.”
Q: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?'
A: Yeah. I was thinking about your question about Ghost Ship, Deep Rock, and the consumer-friendly business models, and I didn't really elaborate on that. So talking about that in relation to the new projects—what we believe in, what we've seen has been a success for us with Deep Rock—is that we keep giving free stuff to our players. And they feel so overwhelmed with that generosity that they want to give back, and they do that by playing our game and talking about it, and buying a few cosmetic DLCs.
But actually, the most important part is that they keep playing our game, and they keep talking about it. And what we believe here is that this model of giving and receiving on both sides. Both the community and the developer feel like they are receiving more than they are giving. We really want to put that into the new projects that we are helping come to life so that they can get into this positive loop. Where everybody feels that they are constantly getting more than they give. I'm just happy about that.
[End.]
Deep Rock Galactic is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.