For the last four months we have been exclusively discussing with one potential partner. After signing mutual NDAs with them we shared all relevant project information. On their side they conducted a thorough due diligence of The Mandate. They brought with them an external industry veteran who reviewed our production budget, the state of our codebase and also our design documents. Current and proposed future members of the development team were both evaluated and interviewed to get a clear understanding of the major production risks and whether we had the necessary experience to tackle them. The feedback was very professional and constructive and we immediately implemented several production changes (since the feedback was given with no strings attached). Next we embarked on a relatively lengthy contract negotiation process which ended up taking longer than expected. We did not feel comfortable announcing anything until a deal was signed and everything set in stone (and besides the NDA restricted what we could discuss).
This changes today as we just signed a contract with Eurovideo Medien GmbH of Germany. The guys are cool and consist of former D&D players who are also fans of games like X-Com, Pirates, Mount & Blade, Elite, FTL and many more. If you want to check out which games they distributed in the past years, have a look at their
website. Actually, their offices are located next to the movie set for the movie classic “Das Boot”.
What is also important is that the guys understand both the type of game experience we are aiming for and also what we are NOT aiming for, e.g. on-the-rails free-2-play shooter with micro-transactions. Eurovideo sees the potential in The Mandate and wants to help us realize the game’s full potential. So what are the implications of this deal?
- Eurovideo will invest to ensure the development of The Mandate
- Perihelion Interactive will have full creative control. Full stop. We will execute the original game concept as we presented to you in the Kickstarter and will follow our vision without any intervention from Eurovideo
- Eurovideo will handle all marketing, PR and distribution activities
- Perihelion Interactive will interact with existing & new backers and release regular updates. There will be no changes here
- Perihelion Interactive will retain full control over backer pledges
- Eurovideo will handle all localization in cooperation with Perihelion Interactive
- We can now guarantee that The Mandate will be localized into German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian (other languages to be discussed)
- Both the English and German versions will be voiced (other languages to be discussed)
- The development team will grow due to this investment and as a result we can pack more content and more hours of fun into the game
- The soundtrack will be 120 minutes instead of 60 minutes and the size of the orchestra will double
How does the road ahead look like with the additional funding? First of all we will now start to staff up the development team. At its peak the team will consist of around 30 developers with a combined AAA experience of 100+ years. The additional funding allows us to bring onboard several veteran developers who are both friends and former co-workers. This will reduce risk and ensure that The Mandate is a great game at release.
Furthermore, we will differentiate in our timeline between the feature Alpha, feature Beta and Content Beta. Whereas the first two relate to the specific features of the game the latter is about the content (quests, factions, ships etc) which are made with our tools [remember the discussion above about our tool chain and object actor model].
Feature Alpha:
Q3 2015 (early)
Feature Beta:
Q3 2015 (late)
Content Beta:
Q4 2015
Launch:
Q1 2016
