PlaySide on growing Dumb Ways To Die: "We just passed Pokémon on TikTok"
PlaySide won Studio of the Year at the Australian Game Developer Awards last month, an achievement crowning over a decade in game development.
The Melbourne-based studio started in 2011 as a pioneer in the free-to-play mobile space, and has grown to become the largest independent games developer in Australia with over 300 staff, going public in 2020.
"We've worked with Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount, SkyDance, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network," lists Ryan McMahon, general manager for PC and console at PlaySide Studios. "If there's a movie studio, we've probably worked with it!
"It really started with our CEO Gerry [Sakkas] and a couple of others who went to market with a game called Catch the Ark, which was an endless runner-style game, one of the first to iOS at the time. That opened the doors to contract work, and that's actually become a bit of an ecosystem that we have within PlaySide."
The studio has now found a balance between work-for-hire and original IP, in a win-win situation where work-for-hire allows the studio to take more risk on the original IP front. But going forward, the studio's primary focus is very much on original IP.
When asked whether PlaySide envisions a future where work-for-hire is not part of the equation at all, McMahon actually says that it's the "future [it's] working towards."
"Original IP is what we love and what we want to be doing," he says. "That's the goal. That's where Ben [Kelly, general manager for Dumb Ways to Die] and I come in; with Ben leading Dumb Ways to Die, which is our own IP, and myself on the PC/console side, running original IP there, like Age of Darkness, World Boss, really working out how we build out those portfolios and make those the sole focus of the studio."
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