Raccoon Logic: We're doing the last hurrah of the games industry we grew up with
Across the road from The Game Awards, in a car park featuring a couple of trailers and some plastic flamingos, sits the Racoon Logic team.
The developer behind the upcoming Revenge of the Savage Planet is demoing the title and conducting interviews with journalists as opposed to doing a big Game Awards trailer. It's a very old school approach to PR.
"Just being part of the big show, you can get lost in the noise a little bit," reasons creative director Alex Hutchinson.
"Doing this for us is more fun, and a bit easier. And I like to think we're doing the last hurrah of the games industry I grew up with, which is… you get an Edge cover, you fly journalists in to talk to you in actual person… it feels like the end. We're doing a physical version of this game with Maximum Games. That's the industry I love. That's how I want to do it. I don't necessarily want to make a games-as-a-service title that costs $200 million, gets unplugged after a week and never gets played."
As the industry ages, you would hope that there is an audience of slightly older games that would appreciate the classic approach.
"That's our bet," he adds. "We will find out next year if there are enough of us. People in their 40s… even if you have kids, you have more disposable income than you did in your 20s, but you have less time. So you might still want to play games, but I feel repressed by games that want me to play every week. I don't want to. I want to spend time with the kids or to finish that house project."
Hutchinson tells us that 2024, in contrast to what has been going on across the industry, has been a good one for the team at Racoon Logic.
"We were wise in that we didn't grow a lot. We stayed about 30 people. We have money in the bank, we haven't had to make any redundancies, we're pretty stable… we have had to be serious in not growing the scope of the game, and not responding to requests from everybody. We're just polishing now and looking forward to its release, and hopefully there is a
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