It’s a tough time to make video games. After years of hearing stories of layoffs, studio closures, buyouts, and downsizing, we know this as fact. Publishing deals are scarcer than they’ve ever been. Audience wallets are tighter. There is an air of malaise around game development, as creatives struggle to overcome a cavalcade of hurdles for creation. It’s why stories like that of PlaySide Studios are so welcome to see.
In mid-2024, the Melbourne-based game studio reported record revenue of AUD $64.6 million for FY24 (via Business News Australia). It recently branched out to offer publishing services, securing the rights to publish viral internet sensation, MOUSE: P.I. For Hire. Its Dumb Ways franchise, acquired wholly from Metro Trains in 2021, continues to be a roaring (and wonderfully endearing) success.
And in the coming year, the studio has major plans for the 1.0 release popular survival RTS, Age of Darkness: Final Stand, fresh plans for the Dumb Ways franchise, and a whole lot more to come.
Smart ways to survive
There is a clear throughline in the work of the developer: a long-running desire to experiment and iterate, and to focus on a range of projects, big and small. As Taylah Walker, Vice President of Games at PlaySide Studios told GamesHub, PlaySide Studios has committed to taking on all fronts.
“We started specifically as a mobile company, then we went into VR, we went into AR, we went into PC – we’ve kind of delved into every sort of space so far,” Walker said.
Eventually, this commitment led them to Kill Knight, a newly-released console game that was the product of rapid-fire experiment, and a desire to branch out. As we covered in a recent preview, Kill Knight is a game about flow state and demonic battles, as you wield weapons in a fight for survival. It was a new sort of game for PlaySide Studios, and a “learning experience” for the team.
“Because we’ve grown so much as a company, a lot of our development projects are [now] multi-year,” Walker said. “They are a lot of resources. They’re so much bigger than what we used to do when we were such a smaller company. So, it was an amazing thing to be able to go, ‘Can we still create a high quality game with a smaller development timeline and a smaller resource group? Is it still going to be the quality that we’d expect from PlaySide?’ We want to be able to do smaller timelines, smaller teams, and still have these really awesome video games … Kill Knight, we’re so happy with how the launch went.”
Of course, Kill Knight isn’t the only newly-released game at PlaySide Studios. The team has also been supporting the development of Age of Darkness: Final Stand for years – and with the game’s 1.0 launch approaching, there’s plenty of excitement surrounding the future of this game, and its incoming multiplayer functionality.
There’s also significant plans to expand the Dumb Ways brand even further, as supported by the releases of mobile game Dumb Ways to Survive (which recently won an Australian Game Developer Award for Excellence in Mobile), and VR spin-off, Dumb Ways: Free for All.
“We’ve got so many passionate people that work on the [Dumb Ways] brand here every day,” Ben Kelly, General Manager of Brand & Licensing at PlaySide Studios for Dumb Ways To Die told GamesHub. “All the projects, known and secret, that are going on with Dumb Ways gets me out of bed every day.”
As with Kill Knight, the Dumb Ways story is also one of experimentation and exploring new mediums. As we’ve previously reported, this brand is one of the secret weapons of PlaySide Studios. It purchased the IP in 2021, and has since grown it into a monolith of the games industry. On TikTok, the official Dumb Ways account has 8.8 million followers – and videos frequently hit millions of views each. With its cartoonish, clumsy heroes, and morbid humour, the franchise maintains a rabid fanbase – and they’ve helped to buoy PlaySide Studios in its growth.
“It’s been a fun journey,” Kelly said. “It’s such a nostalgic brand for so many people. Re-invigorating [it] on social media, on TIkTok, has been a lot of fun – as well as dressing up in the bean suits.” As noted by Kelly, the Dumb Ways plush mascots recently appeared at PAX Aus 2024, and – wildly – in New York’s Times Square. That specific occasion was to promote the release of Dumb Ways: Free for All, one of the studio’s newest releases.
This spin-off, built in VR, has been well-received so far, for its social aspects and variety of mini-games. For PlaySide Studios, it was also a welcome chance to push the talents of developers. As Kelly told GamesHub, PlaySide has an historic expertise in the VR space, working on a range of projects with Meta and others over the years.
“We wanted to pull from the expertise we’ve built over the last little while,” he said. “You know, we’ve got some fantastic engineers that are great at optimising for headset use. It’s a different way to develop a game, right? … A lot of attention went into the art and feel of what’s all around you.”
It’s just another feather in PlaySide Studios’ cap, as it continues to grow from strength to strength – seemingly in defiance of the current conditions of the games industry.
Finding new avenues
Over the last few years, PlaySide Studios’ growth has spiked. The virality of the Dumb Ways TikTok acount has pushed awareness of the studio and its major brands, and a cavalcade of successful, award-winning projects has also allowed it to branch out, forge new deals, and focus on owned IP.
“We saw a huge spike, especially in our growth. About a year or two ago, was when we went through that massive, massive spike,” Walker said. “We went from this small company, to suddenly having 300 or so people now … It’s been really awesome to see the different types of projects that we’re able to tackle.”
Per Walker, Playside Studios previously operated on a scale of “six months to one year” for standard development to create fun, engaging mobile games. Recently, the team has been able to scale up to take on a variety of projects, including those multi-year endeavours.
“Back in the day, we’d have one person wearing multiple hats. They’re doing animation, they’re doing art, they’re doing all the sorts of things that they can,” Walker said. “Whereas now, we’re able to get really talented people that can focus on their specific discipline, which just means the quality of the games that we’re putting out is even higher.”
In addition to refocusing disciplines for more effective game development, the growth of PlaySide Studios’ profile and awareness has also allowed for significant business expansion. MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is one of the first games PlaySide Studios will publish under its PlaySide Publishing banner.
Read: MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is a “twisted mirror” of 1930s America
“I think it’s the perfect next step for PlaySide,” Walker said. “We’ve gotten to the point now where we are in a position to be able to help other people develop, which is so important. You get to see some of the games that we look at, and they’re at all different stages of development. Some will be towards the end, and they really just need that help marketing or getting it to launch. Then there’s other projects that we look at that are really early on in development, but you can just see there’s a diamond in the rough … it’s something that you really want to invest in and help them.”
As Walker notes, PlaySide Studios is in a robust position, having operated steadily for more than a decade, and continuing to grow, year-on-year. It’s one of the largest game studios in Melbourne, and comprises veteran talent from many disciplines. While getting into publishing provides a new commercial avenue for PlaySide, it also allows the team to elevate new, creative ideas.
Weathering the storm
Per PlaySide Studios, it’s uniquely positioned to help other studios realise their vision, not only due to in-house expertise, but due to the Australian games industry environment. Australia has some of the best government-led video game funding in the world, and the state of Victoria has well-supported game development for many years.
“We work pretty closely with the government,” Kelly said. “From an industry point of view, [funding and support is] only going to help boost the industry when [it] falls on tougher times, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years.”
“Things like the DGTO [Digital Games Tax Offset] really enables publishers to still put out games, and continue to support the industry … We’ve got such a strong games industry here in Australia that we want to continue to try and support any way we can.”
Read: The Australian Digital Games Tax Offset passes the senate
Ongoing government support for the growth of the Australian games industry also provides relative stability, in a time when many studios are being forced to shut down due to a lack of overarching support.
“It’s obviously tough to observe that prolonged period of layoffs, and things like we’re seeing in the industry,” Kelly said. “But in saying that, I think all of these things in all industries, they move in cycles. We go in, and we come out of these things.”
“We feel like things are starting to turn around for the better … Initiatives like the DGTO are really going to help build a much more stable future for the local Australian development teams, and [we’re] seeing increased investment from major international publishers, developers.”
Part of weathering the storm, for PlaySide Studios, has also been about securing a diversity of revenue streams. In the beginning, the studio was a private company with a focus on securing contract work where possible, and then using that basis to fund its own original IP projects. In December 2021, the studio went public, and this allowed for new sources of funding – but what remained most important was a focus on original IP, and the knowledge that funding should never be strictly relied on.
“It’s definitely not a magic solution,” Kelly said. “The cost of funding can go up and down, depending on how investors see the company, so we still operate with the mindset that whatever original IP projects that we want to work on, we need to be able to fund those projects internally, if we can. That dictates the things we say yes or no to. That’s how we try to structure it, so that things externally don’t affect PlaySide as much.”
It’s this structure that has allowed PlaySide Studios to maintain hope, even in a devastating year for the games industry – in Australia, and overseas. Looking to the future, there is much on the horizon for the company, including new, unannounced games, and “a few different things” set to be announced in the early months of 2025.
“I think there’s a lot of great things and great games that can come out of harder times,” Kelly said. While the circumstances aren’t ideal, maintaining this sense of positivity into an uncertain future can do a lot for hope and excitement. All things go in cycles, and the PlaySide Studios team firmly believes there’s better times ahead, buoyed by creativity, burning passion, and a real sense of ingenuity.
It’s certainly something worth believing in.
