How indie publisher Hooded Horse aims to do right by developers
The strategy/simulation/role-playing genre is huge on PC. That isn't news for anybody who scrolls through Steam for a while or has been playing video games for a decade or two, but its size means it can be tough for a game to make an impact, especially as an indie developer. When you don't have the backing of a publisher like Private Division (in the case of Kerbal Space Program) or the brand recognition of something like Civilization, how can you get people to find your game?
Hooded Horse is a small indie video game publisher that was founded in 2019. It has since grown to have around 20 titles under its belt while still touting a team of just 12 people, at the time of this writing. Like many other indie publishers it has singular focus, choosing to double down on strategy, simulation, and role-playing games.
Right now, it looks to be a good fit. CEO Tim Bender and president Snow Rui sat down with Game Developer recently to talk about their plans for 2023. They spoke about how their love of those genres propels them to not only market and publish games, but also to understand them. Each person on the team has a specialty and a genre they have an affinity for (Rui prefers turn-based tactical games while Bender says he enjoys strategy games that are "halfway" to being RPGs). That all helps the company successfully publish games like Against the Storm, Terra Invicta, or the upcoming historical sim Manor Lords.
"One thing that we constantly see in the marketing, a sort of a misstep with others in the marketing of strategy games, is that if it's done by people who don't understand strategy games," Rui explained. "They stress the wrong things that don't connect with players. By being gamers ourselves and really understanding
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