The seed of the idea for newly formed mobile studio Odyssey Interactive was planted when CEO Richard Henkel and President Dax Andrus worked on Teamfight Tactics at Riot Games.
The leads of that time were co-product, as Henkel puts it in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, “locked in a corner of the building behind a mound of whiteboards,” that gave her the tight feel of a smaller team within a much larger infrastructure. At the time, Henkel says she often imagined how cool it would be to replicate this kind of feeling in a studio of her own.
Henkel left Riot Games to move to Canada in preparation for the birth of his third child, but when he realized that there were no studios like Riot Games in the neck of the forest, he became seriously about forming one of his own. He brought in Andrus, as well as former ex-Rioters Eric Lawless as CTO and David Capurro as CCO to form Odyssey Interactive.
“For us to set up in a studio where even fresh people from school can live comfortably, was something pretty appealing”
Richard Henkel
Odyssey Interactive began raising funds around February of this year, and is just finished raising $ 6 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Golden Ventures, the A16z Cultural Leadership Fund, and investors including Discord CMO Eros Resmini, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and former Blizzard vice president Paul Della Bitta. The team used the funding to start its studio in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, about an hour west of Toronto.
“We discussed pretty hard, ‘Do we do Toronto or do we do Kitchener-Waterloo or something in the area?'” Henkel says. “And finally, we settled on KW because it’s a tech hotspot for the Canadian ecosystem. It’s a place where we can provide a reasonably stable quality of life with a low cost of living for people in the gaming industry, which we was approachable.
“When people are juniors in the sector, I think it’s very common that the salaries that are raised do not necessarily provide the same stability of [being able to afford a place to live] and not be super complacent about money. So that we can set up a studio where even fresh people from school can live comfortably was something quite appealing, while also not having to give up on the potential to bring in high quality talent, because again – it’s a tech hotspot. “
Richard Henkel
In addition to the low cost of living and easy local Blackberry headquarters, Kitchener-Waterloo also hosts the University of Waterloo, which Henkel says will be the key to the studio’s goals of recruiting many young, emerging talent.
“We’re a little worried that, as we get older, we forget what people really want,” he says. “And we’ll just build the games we like. And you send it, and then people are like, ‘Yeah, I’m not over it.’ So by building a company around that young energy, we can build games that stay ideally current with what players really and today want. “
Despite known goals of creating experiences like they had at Riot Games, Henkel says the studio does not want to get too big. At the end of year two, he projects that they want to be with about 20 people, and although they can grow as a result, they do not want to move too fast.
“I think our overall strategy has been to try to build a company more like a Supercell than a Riot or Blizzard than a larger studio,” says Henkel. “And this is pretty much grounded in many of our experiences working on Teamfight Tactics, where it was a smaller team. The agility you get when you have a small team, and the distance calls that have to be made. happen, are faster because it is a smaller group of people who have bought the same idea, the same vision. We want to try to imitate that as a studio ideal across different teams. “
“If we had taken a year, two years, something to really polish and try to make the thing perfect, we would probably miss the opportunity.”
Dax Andrus
The team is also looking to Supercell for how it will consider game development and release cycles. Although Odyssey Interactive starts by working on just one game, it plans to gradually spin up multiple small, in-house teams to enable it to work on multiple titles at once. Ideally, Odyssey wants to reach a point where it broadcasts something new every year and a half.
“That was something we mainly learned about Team Fight Tactics,” says Andrus. “From the decision that the game would be made to shipping was four months. And I think if we were to take a year, two years, something to really polish and try to make the thing perfect, we would have the chance probably missed.The market would have moved from the auto-battler genre.But I think we were able to create the market for the genre by hitting at the right time and moving fast.
“That we want to continue by breathing in a set of ideas and asking, ‘Is this fun? Is this where we think this genre could go? Is this a new genre that can come up?’ I think the only real way to do that is to move quickly and validate with players instead of sitting and polishing on your ideas for years and hoping that conditions are still the same as when you played the game for a few years started making up about that point. “
Odyssey Interactive is still a brand new studio, so it does not have much to announce yet in terms of what types of games it makes. It’s focused on mobile games, which Andrus says is because the studio specifically wants to target the “next generation of gamers” – a generation that increasingly uses a centralized device that is the focus of all their social gaming. In other words, everyone has phones, and more and more young people are playing both and communicating with friends on them at the same time.
Dax Andrus
Henkel adds that mobile has long been a driving force in Eastern markets, and although the West is starting to catch on, so far a huge chunk of the major mobile games in the West are console transplants: including Fortnite, Call of Duty, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
“We want to try to build games with the depth of the PC game, but designed first around the limitations of mobile, and then maybe bring them to PC or console on the go,” he says. “Just because the limitations on a phone are that you have two thumbs up, so there’s a lot of limitations to how you can deliver really deep, quality gameplay. Also just networking and pinging – if you don’t mind that thing. “Think about it, all your design decisions will bite you in the ass later when you try to bring it to mobile. And we do not want that audience of new gamers to feel like they are playing second fiddle to other platforms.”
“It’s as easy as being a developer to lose yourself by looking at your computer screen and forgetting about the lives of players at the other end who are helped by dark times through games”
Richard Henkel
What kind of games can we expect from Odyssey, Andrus describes one overriding principle for the studio’s titles: “Games You Live.” For them, this means three things: the first is that the game has a purpose and gives a sense of growth or fulfillment – it is not just mindless entertainment. The second is that it attracts a vibrant community with lots of discussions and social interaction. And the third is that their games have the longing. Andrus says the founders were spoiled by working on League of Legends, and they want to create games that have “deep master loops” and have the potential to last a decade or more.
Henkel illustrates this further at the end of our discussion with a personal story in response to me asking him what success would look like for Odyssey Interactive, say, five years down the road.
“This was in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay,” he says. “LCS finals between CLG and TSM. I’m reef. I’m sitting in the back hall with CLG. And Xmithie sat kind of bent over, looking nervous and Aphromoo, who was the support at the time, was like ‘Dude, it’s good. We’ve been training here our whole lives. ‘And it was this moment of realization for me that this is a game I’ve been putting myself in, at that point I think for seven years. And after this moment at coming to them was not just, ‘Oh, yes, all the exercises we put into League of Legends.’ It was all the games they grew, all the skills they learned about teamwork and collaboration and theory- crafting that went in here.
“And we walked out on stage. And they were sitting for game five and the crowd around us was bursting at the seams. And I was just looking around. That was the moment that made me realize again how much of an impact games can have on people … it’s this feeling of being in a stadium surrounded by people who all love this game. We rejoice over the same things. That’s the type of game we hope we can make.
“It’s as easy as being a developer to lose yourself all day to your computer screen and forget about the lives of players at the other end of it who make meaningful friendships, or build lifelong memories, or are helped by really dark times through match.
“For me, building success is games that have that level of impact. We know it will be difficult to send because games are competitive as hell. But we hope to do so by using our experiences as players and love that we feel for games and the experience we have had working on League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, we can hopefully create games like that for that next generation that comes on its own on mobile. “
.
