Pocketpair interview: We’ll keep funding games even if our current titles crash and burn

It's a bit disheartening. It upsets you a little bit. Never fun when you open, you know, social media, Discord, whatever, and it's just lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Even if these six, seven games all, you know, crash and burn, I'm sure we're just going to keep signing more and keep, you know, helping people find the courage to just keep making games. Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. One of the big shocking breakout hits of 2024 was Pow World. If you've not played it, you've certainly heard of it. It's a game that immediately became embroiled in controversy because of its apparent similarities to the Pokémon series with various baseless accusations thrown at the game, including that the game uses AI AI artwork, something the developer Pocket Pair has denied. Now, nearly two years on, and Power World remains a hit with more than a million players playing the game every single month. And what's more, the company has put all that Power World money to good use and reinvesting it in publishing other indie games, funding other indie

games, too. And so I'm pleased to be speaking to the person in charge of that publishing division. He also happens to run the community for Pocket Pair and Power World as well. It is John Buckley. Hello, John or Bucky, uh, as as I think you prefer to be called. Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Chris. Now, I'm not going to waste questions asking about the lawsuit because I know you can't talk about it and I'm not going to I know lots of people asking about AI, but Power World doesn't use AI, so I don't know why, but obviously there's been so much conversation about your game that has little to do with the actual game itself. How's that affected you and the team and the fact there's so much noise around your game?
Yeah. No, it's it's affected us a lot. It's obviously pretty surreal to release a game like PAL World does whatever was 20 million 25 million in in in 1 month and then for so much of the conversation around the game to not be about the game itself. Uh it's obviously very

disorientating. It was really hard to deal with at that time and even now almost 2 years later it still kind of affects us uh a little bit but I mean generally speaking we just kind of ignore it now. We kind of ignored this kind of buzz uh around pal world. Uh there was a time again two years ago now, but uh there was a time when you could just say anything about pal world. You just say anything and you would get a lot of attention uh whether it be true or or untrue. Obviously, you know, it's a bit disheartening. It upsets you a little bit. It's never fun when you open, you know, social media, Discord, whatever, and it's just, you know, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. But at the end of the day, we're just trying to make a game. We're just trying to make our fans happy. So,
uh, we just do our best to kind of tune it all out. Now,
the morale must have been quite hit at the time, but I guess you sort of get used to it and you end up focusing on the people that do love your game and are playing your game and they're the ones that are probably louder now than than necessarily there were a year ago.

Yes, definitely.
Read an interview you did and I was really interested in something in that interview because when it comes to hiring staff, right, at Pocket Bet, people aren't assigned to a project. Is that right? Is that how it is that how that works?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, pocket pair is kind of a very open hiring system. Uh, of course, you know, we do recruit for very specific things time to time. You know, maybe we need a new modeler for PAL World or a new rigger for PAL World. Of course, but generally speaking, uh, Pocket Pair since its inception, which is now about 9 years ago, uh, we've had a very kind of incubation culture. So, we love making games. We love making little games, little prototype games and we don't discourage that internally. So, you know, if we hire someone to work on PAL World, if they want to take an hour of their day every day to, you know, tinker with something with someone from another team, we're not going to stop them because a lot of our best ideas have kind of come from this culture. Also, we don't really lock people into

one role or or one game. Uh sometimes, you know, we need a bit of help with another one of our projects and we'll kind of openly ask, hey, does anyone want to help with this a little bit for a month or two and again we don't discourage this. It works really well for us. I know that for some companies that this might be like a big red flag, but for us it works really well. We're very fluid. We're very quick. Uh and I think one of our biggest strengths is that we're able to do things much faster than maybe other studios are able to do. So, do you still work on I know you've got some old games, previous titles to Power that you still support. Do you still work on multiple projects? You have this massive game that comes out and I guess the urge would be to put everybody on that and point all your guns at that, but it sounds like that isn't the case.
No. Yeah, we definitely have other other things kind of happening. Uh, of course, the bulk of people at Pocket Pair are now working on PAL World. Uh, but we have a really small team working on PAL Farm, which is the PAW World spin-off. We have one of the original pocket pair teams are still working on Crafttopia,

still giving it more updates every year. We have a few guys who are kind of floating between some very early experimental projects and then we're always looking to kind of form new teams
if we have, you know, interesting ideas. We're not afraid to start a project and then put it on the shelf if it's not working. We're not afraid to do that. Uh but Pow World has now given us the kind of luxury to kind of spin out more kind of mini teams. And when I say mini teams, I'm like one or two people. Like these are just very very small conceptual kind of projects.
I see. Yeah. And I know that um I know this isn't Pocket Bear and yourself aren't directly involved in this stuff, but you've got other organizations making a mobile game. You're doing building merchandise and stuff with different companies. So you've got that sort of Power World empire being built through partnerships and stuff as well.
Yeah, slowly but surely. You're right. Uh, you know, pretty much all the mobile stuff is handled by Craftton, right? It's not it's not directly us, but we are we are involved in in the

conversations.
Yeah, it's your guy IP. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, see, it's a thing I'm interested to know because I I always have to wonder what happens internally when something like it's very rare for a game to come out and do 24 million 25 million whatever it is in a month. It does happen and oddly at that time it happened to two games, you and Hell Divers too. Yes. And I've spoken to Arrowhead a couple of times about the deer in the headlights sort of oh my god what do we do with all this situation that they had to contend with all these people want to talk to you all these people want to play your game they're all demanding different things how did you manage that at the time did you suddenly have to bring in partner team staff up or did you just walk around in a corner and sort of I don't know what did you do how did you manage that
yeah uh we managed with great difficulty uh I would say it was certainly kind of a avalanche of attention.
Uh, and it was basically coming from like two places. We're getting like just unbelievable amount of player attentions

which comes in the form of not only, you know, tweets or or comments, but also just like bug reports, right? You just get this like absolute deluge of feedback and and bug reports and crash reports, but then also like industry attention. uh you know we're just getting dozens dozens of emails from media and other developers and companies and third party services every day. So it it was a huge amount of information to kind of take in on a daily basis. Uh as far as like the player side of things, we were pretty quick to set up a streamlined way to kind of speak to us. So we used to do everything on Discord Overdunge our first game, Crafttopia, our our our second game. Everything from feedback to bug reports was done in discord channels and pal world we very quickly realized that would be impossible just to go through the information. So we set up kind of forms. It's all kind of set up on our back end. So if you report a bug report inside of

pow world itself it just goes straight to our slack and then we have you know various channels set up to kind of filter all the what's feedback what's a bug report etc.
Oh wow.
Uh and that really improved our kind of ability to fix things quickly. the industry side, we're kind of slower. Again, this is just it's just manpower, right? You get, I don't know, 20 industry emails a day. Yeah, someone has to go through them and talk about them and and and check them. Um, but we we've tried to kind of streamline that as best as possible, but that still takes, you know, a little bit more time to go through.
So, really, it was just about putting processes in place and it was and it sounds like you did a good Did you learn from anybody to do that? It sounds like a very efficient system that you managed to do. You
no pretty much just uh again pocket pair is very blessed to have some real uh eggheheads, people who are very good at kind of spinning things up quickly, guys who love to code and stuff like this. So I don't pretend to know how any of it works, but you know, one day it wasn't there and the next day it was all kind

of coming in. So
wow. Well, I'm not going to spend all my I'm going to get on the topic I do want to talk about which is your publishing stuff. But yeah,
one of the things I love
is that it's now overwhelmingly positive on Steam, Power World, which I don't know where you were rated um at the beginning, but I can't I I gather it wasn't that. Um that feels like quite the moment. You know, what's got the game to this point?
Yeah.
Do you think it's cuz some of the people that maybe the game's not for them and they jumped in because they heard it was like Pokémon or whatever. Are they Are they It's cuz they've gone away or is it because the game's improved drastically?
I think it's kind of all of the above. I mean, first of all, we've never stopped working on it. You know, we've shipped four or five I don't know when this interview is going to go out, but four or five kind of major uh updates. We've added new islands, new pals, we've done just tons of patches and and and and fixes. And I think not only have has the game improved, but like the quality of improvements has kind of gone up quite a lot. And I think our core fans have really kind of fallen in love with what

Pal World's turning into. I also just think you know when power world released again you know millions of players are jumping in at the same time you know a certain percentage of them are going in to kind of explore what's this you know crazy popular thing and I think some of those people at that time just didn't like what they saw and I think some people maybe thought PAL world was going to be something else you know I think there was an idea January 2024 that PAL world might be this thing when in reality pal world was very different and I just think as the years have gone on. Maybe more people who kind of waited to see what the game was actually going to turn into, to see if we were going to support it long term, have now come to play the game. And our community's only gotten bigger and stronger, and now we're Yeah. blessed to have passed that overwhelmingly positive threshold.
Very good. Yes. Well, let's talk about the thing that, you know, you're actually leading, which is this pocket pair publishing.
Yeah.
Uh division. I love it, by the way, when

an independent company makes a load of money and puts that money back into the industry. It's very, you know, I wouldn't blame you if you just all bought fancy yachts and just sailed around the world for a bit, but no, back back into the games industry, and I love to see it. What was the motivation behind doing this?
Yeah, I look, Pocket Bear has struggled for many years. Uh, we are no stranger to that lifestyle, you know. Uh, I think it's easily forgotten now because of PAL World, but you know, we've shipped games that were moderately successful, but just about funded the next thing we wanted to do. So, we're no stringering uh and and and trying to get by uh by yourself.
Shortly after Pow released, a lot of people reached out to us kind of unsolicited, you know, people, hey, I'm working on this game or I'm working with this investor so and so. And we kind of thought, I mean, is there any reason that that that we would really kind of get involved? You know, we're not publishers. We don't have the resources to really act as a as a publisher. But

we had a few serious conversations with a couple of kind of well-known indie studios. And what surprised us the most, again, all of our games have basically been self-published, right? So that entire industry is relatively alien to us. Uh what surprised us the most was the conditions that are kind of normalized now in the indie publishing world. You know, you're kind of meeting with these four, fiveman teams who are looking for what is relatively not a lot of money and they are very used to just giving up all of their revenue for one year or all of their revenue until X amount. Uh and we just couldn't believe it. you know, we just couldn't believe that this is what's kind of become normal is, you know, you want to make this thing that you are totally in love with and the price you have to pay is someone else is going to, you know, take all your money for years and years and years and years just so you can get it made. So, we realized, look, we're in a position where luckily we're very well off. We're not really wanting for

anything at the moment. we can kind of afford to give indie devs the money they need and not take these kind of huge revenue share agreements. You know, of course, we'll take a little bit back until we kind of recover our money, but we're not doing any of the, you know, none of these 100 zero kind of splits or anything like that. Kind of much more fair
kind of feels that let these devs survive from sale one onwards rather than from, you know, sale 50,000 or or whatever.
Well, what what can you do? Because I mean how big's the team? What are you capable of handling? Tell us about your publishing division.
Yeah, sure. Sure. Our publishing division. Technically speaking, at this moment, Pocket Pair Publishing is basically two people. It's myself and one other person. Everything outside of that, we essentially cannibalize our own resources, which again we're very able to do because we're just so lucky with kind of the manpower we have. Uh so for example uh pocket pair kind of has two

kind of standardized agreements that we offer to people. The first is just straight funding. We'll just give you the money for however much you need to to make your game and then we will just take a kind of a small revenue share back until we kind of recoup our our our costs. Uh the second one is the same. We'll kind of give you all the funding you need but we'll also kind of handle the kind of Asia side of things. So Asian marketing, Asian distribution, things like this. We're based in Japan. All of our games have been very successful in Asia. So, we feel very confident in our Asian marketing, PR and distribution abilities and a lot of Western devs don't have this luxury. So, we can kind of offer our services in that regard. We are at the moment just using the Power World team. You know, if you join Pocket Bear Publishing and you want to sell your game in Asia, it's just it's our world guys that are helping you uh essentially, which are a very good team to work with. Um but we're hoping kind of as we find our footing we'll we'll kind of spin out a bit more to set up you know proper uh

established jeans.
So part of what you offer is just investment basically you're but you're there's basically pocket pair investment and there's pocket pair publishing.
Yeah kind of
but in a specific way. So the reason we don't call it investments because in in the very beginning a lot of people said oh you should call it like pocket pair investments but a lot of uh game investments and stuff come with equity deals you know uh whereas we don't do that again we literally just fund the game we don't buy out any of the company we don't take any of the IPs nothing like this we really are kind of very handsoff
uh so we didn't feel it was right to call it an investment
so do you not do much oversight make sure the game's coming along fine and is or would you sort of step away and let the developer do what it needs to do?
Yeah, I mean of course there has to be some element of involvement
but I would say we are considerably more hands-off than than most. We might be kind of similar to kind of like an outer sloth kind of kind of situation. We do

obviously need to structure okay well if you need this much money over two years this is how we're going to break it up right and then we'll kind of break it into into milestones as they say. So there is some back and forth. There's kind of every two or three months they'll come back to us and say, "Hey, here's the latest build. Do you have any feedback? What do you think?" Uh, we just kind of go through these motions. We don't have the authority to kind of make changes. We don't have the authority to change their creative vision. All we can do is kind of say, "Hey, this looks great. You're going in the right direction." Or, "Have you considered doing this instead?" But ultimately, if our developers say, "Hey, we're going to go this way." Then, you know, so be it. It's it's their game. It's their vision. We're not going to kind of impose on top of that.
You started is the game Dead Take. Dead Take your first one. Is that the right Yeah,
that's right.
How's How did that partnership come about? What have you learned? What have you learned from it?
Yeah, Dead Take came about in the JW Hotel uh I think the day before the Game Awards.
Oh wow.

Abu Bakr Salem, the uh founder of Surgeon Studios, you know, nicely cornered me in the bar. Uh he told me they were working on this game or they were trying to work on this game. He pitched me a couple of games actually. Uh I don't think he'd mind me saying that. Uh and Dead Take just really stood out to me. I'm a big FMV fan. It's a really underserved genre. No one's really making them these days. And I like the idea of kind of splicing FMV elements with this kind of like walking simulator horror. They weren't asking for much. It was a very modest plan. It was very well laid out. They knew the beginning, they knew the middle, they knew the end. There was very little back and forth in terms of the planning of the deal because they had already kind of had everything structured. So, all they really needed us to do was come in and kind of fund this project and then help them a little bit with some of the marketing beats. Uh, and it was a lot of fun. You know, it was a lot of fun. What we learned is, you know, that we can try and be as hands off as possible, but there's always going to have to be some level of oversight. you know, our kind of dream was here's the money, you know, good

luck, Godspeed. But of course, there'll always come a time when we need to jump in a little bit, offer some advice and stuff like that. But it was a really positive experience. Uh, and we hope Sergeent feel good about it, too. But it shipped on time. It came out well, and other players seemed really, really happy with it.
Your lineup going forward, please add or correct if I get something wrong. Nevergrave, Truck Fool, Normal Fishing, Cassette Boy, and Vision Quench.
Yes, that's it.
Talk us about these. I mean, what what makes these pocket pair games? What was it that Yeah. What makes them you games for you?
So, Nevergrave, which I'll start with, this is kind of the special game of the group. Uh because Nevergrave is a spin-off team from Pocket Pair.
So, the studio is called Front Side 180. Uh and these are a spin-off studio of ourselves. They've been working on this game a while. It's financed by us. The production is kind of overseen by us. Really, really nice team. It's very tiny. It's about three, three and a half people. They've been working super hard

hard on it for a long time. There was always the question of whether they release it themselves or if we release it as pocket pair. But when we spun up Pocket Pair Publishing, we realized, well, you know, this is the perfect opportunity to make this one of our publishing titles. Truckfall is a gorgeous little handpainted game from a Polish studio, Mythic Owl. Again, very, very small team. Truckfall was kind of a very scary one for us because it was the very very very first pitch we ever got on our website. So, we opened up a a pitch website
and that was the very very first one. It was like the first hour they had it I I you know, I assume already prepared and everything was perfect. The budget was perfect. The monthly budget was perfect. The plan was perfect. The vision was perfect. The idea was perfect. The marketing and we were terrified because we thought if this is what every pitch is going to be like, we'll be bankrupt in, you know, yeah, bankrupt 12 months from now. Uh, fortunately, every pitch has not been like that. But there was

just no reason not to sign Trufflele. And again, we we we jumped on it. Uh and hilariously over the last year I've kind of bumped into several unnamed publishers uh who all told me that oh you know we were just about to sign truck and then suddenly the truck guys disappeared and you know turned out
you got that first
maybe maybe screwed in. Yeah maybe souped in on that one. All the others then you know then sport normal fishing and uh vision quench and cassette boy. Again these are all tiny teams. Uh cassette boy is a solo dev. Vision quench is three guys. No more fishing is is a solo dev as well from the UK actually. Look, just really really nice ideas really really kind of pure about wanting to make something fun and they all kind of the running thread between these is when we talk to these guys just their enthusiasm for making the game is just so infectious and and it's hard for us to kind of turn down the opportunity to to work with these guys. Again, they're all quite small. You know, none of these games are kind of huge $10

million games. It's nothing like that. They're just little games made by people who really want to make a game comfortably uh in their own way at their own pace uh without being told what to do. That's I guess what on a pocket bear publishing game is. M
would you sign a $10 million game or is that just not not in your remit?
We've been pitched many uh you know obviously obviously we've been pitched game on both ends of the spectrum. We've been pitched games that are, you know, in the in the thousands of dollars, like student games. And we've been pitched games genuinely almost touching the kind of nine figure range. I would never say never. Uh we don't really have any set budgets again cuz we're quite fortunate. We just haven't found one that really speaks to us yet. We've spoken to a few that seem very promising and we will likely see at some big game show over the next couple of years but just didn't really click with us personally and we don't want to just give money for the

sake of giving money. Uh you know we obviously need to feel that there's something kind of special behind it. So at the moment no but you know ask me again in one year and maybe maybe we'll have signed something. So I'm interested to know what was in that truck full deck that made that just immediately made you go this is exactly what we're looking for. I mean you kind of ran through it a little bit there. So but what are you looking for when when a publishers right now preparing to send you something? What or not publishers developers preparing to send you something?
Yeah. So I think the vibe that we really want to hear when someone's pitching a game is that they actually want to make the game. And that might sound strange and almost slightly cynical, but you get a lot of pitch decks or I mean again we're very inexperienced. You know, this is only our first year. Uh so other publishers might shake their fist at this, but you get a lot of pitch decks that kind of have a lot of fluff to them. It's a lot of sales projections or here's all the games every member on the team has

worked on over the last 25 years and and and you know it's a lot of kind of the things around the game but not so much about the game itself. Whereas the truck pitch came along literally every single slide was about the story of the game, what they want to do with the game, their plans for the game. There was a few slides on if they ship the game. Well, they have this idea for, you know, what comes after the game and and everything was just so nice and and and and and so sweet. And then the second thing is uh you'll get a lot of pitches that will just have a pie chart and it will say, you know, we need a million dollars for pie chart reasons. Whereas they sent us a separate Excel sheet. I mean, I couldn't I mean Europeans, I guess. And it was just bang bang bang. It was we need the money for this and this and this and this and this and month one, month two, month three. And it was down to the exact scent. Uh one of the few pitch tickets we've seen where we need this much money to the decimal, right? And again, it was just, you know, you instantly before you even meet these guys, you instantly feel these guys really want to make this game

and they've gone to the lengths to show exactly what they need to make that game. It's not a it's not a vibe like they know what they need to do. And again, you know, it's hard to it's hard to say no to something like that. I when I used to hire people and I used to sit in a meeting afterwards and everyone would be talking about the interviews that we just did and someone will go, "Oh, they're really good at social media or this." And they would give me loads of different reasons as to why that person's the person to hire. I only ever look for two things. One, can they can they do the job right? I need to know they can do the job. You know, I'm not going to hire someone that can't write to work on a on a media publication. So, I need to know that. And you can probably see that through what they you know the deck or whatever the the in my case a portfolio.
The second thing I want to know and this is really important. Do they want to do it?
You know the amount the amount of people that I've come interviewed in a in a games media publication who haven't written anything in over a year. And I'm like well you don't want to do it. You know it's not this is you've got to want

to do this. And then you get into the details. You get into the finer details after that. But but for me, you need to tick those two boxes. You fail one of those boxes and you're not getting to the next stage. But if you think they're quite simple boxes to tick, but that's the majority of it. If you want to do it and you can do it, then I'm I'm likely to want to work with you because I know that you're going to put the effort in, you're going to put the energy in, you're going to put the passion in, and I know that you're capable. And if it doesn't work out, well, these things sometimes don't work out for me. That's the bulk of it. And I know that's completely different to publishing video games. No, surprisingly similar. Surprisingly similar to be honest. You know, again, not to be kind of too cynical about it, but you know, sometimes games are just made for the sake of it, right? You know, there are some studios out there that it's just what they got to do. Maybe they're x amount of people or or the company needs to make x amount of money. And you see a lot of pitches like that. And again, that's just how it is sometimes. Uh, you know, I understand that part of the

industry, but I we're just probably not that type of publisher, I guess. You know, we just we really want to work with people who kind of have that real passion and and and drive to make games.
I know it's only a year old, but I always find the publishing sector really challenging. Whenever I talk to publishers, some sometimes it sounds so much of it is just luck. Really, it does. Um, how have you how have you found
the market and knowing what to do? And I guess you're mostly funding, so it's it's per it's perhaps not not the same thing. But hey, how have you found it?
Quite difficult, quite scary. It's surprisingly one of those bubbles of the game industry that there's very little info about if you want to do it, you know. So, you kind of have to go in blind in the beginning. There's not a lot of resources there for people who want to set up a a kind of publishing wing. But something that we found very quickly and we're very lucky with is pretty much every publisher we've reached out to for help or advice has

been so incredibly willing to kind of share share their systems, share their ideas, share any advice. Uh we have just been reaching out to everyone. Shout out to everyone I've emailed over the last one year. Uh I have yet to meet a publisher who didn't want to kind of have a chat and and kind of share their strats. So uh we've been super lucky. uh in that regard. If I will if I'll shout out one person in particular, it's Tim from uh Qued Horse.
Maybe the most generous man and generous publisher I've ever had the fortune of uh speaking with.
You know, his name comes up a lot um um uh in my life. Uh honestly, I was at an event yesterday and people some somebody there talking about him in relation to a game.
Yeah, the best.
Well, now I'm going to ask one more question. It's I tend to end on a question like this, but this one's a little bit different. What does what does success look like for Pocket Pair Publishing?
What does success look like? I think success for Pocket Pair Publishing is

that we just keep funding games. I think the reality is that as long as Pocket Pair is successful, Pocket Pair Publishing will just continue to operate as we are. Uh at the moment, I don't see a situation where we stop for the sake of of stopping. Even if these six, seven games all, you know, crash and burn, I'm sure we're just going to keep signing more uh and keep, you know, helping people find the courage to just keep making games. Uh, of course, you know, if one of these games is a mega hit and sells 25 million, I won't complain. But, uh, you know, we're not going to be too put out if if it doesn't.
That's a wonderful thing, John. Uh, Bucky, sorry. Um, uh, thank you so much for your time. Um, uh, good luck with some of these games. I look forward to seeing them and, um, yeah, and obviously the continued, uh, development of Power World, uh, and whatever it is. And POW POW Farm, did you say? Did I?
I'm Yeah, working up in the farm at the moment.

Well, good luck with all of that and thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much, Chris.
Well, that's it for today's episode of the Game Business Show. We'll be back as always with more news, analysis, and interviews in the coming days. So, please make sure to subscribe to us at thegamebusiness.com or via our many, many, many channels. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.