Exclusive Interview with Fatshark's CEO: How to not ship broken games and more

A: Fatshark is working together with THQ Nordic, formally known as Nordic Games, did their name change affect Fatshark in any way?

M: It’s had to say, I’m not sure really. But I think it’s a great name change because it was a bit confusing with the games convention and the game publisher, so I think it was a smart move, absolutely, a good move. THQ has done some classic games back in the day so I think this will be a positive for us since they are helping us make the physical copies of Vermintide.

A: Speaking of physical copies of Vermintide, selling Vermintide digitally on Steam worked like a charm, 500,000 copies in six months, so why make physical disks for consoles? Is the market bigger for physical on consoles?

M: We are making physical disks for PC as well and that’s because some countries has poor internet connection, it take a long time to download, and then there is also a lot of people who wants a physical product because it’s fun. And I want one myself haha! No but they are cool, I like physical products. I love the digital format and we have always focused on digital distribution and the digital format is a fantastic medium but sometimes you just want a physical copy. Then there is the commercial point of view, that our game is seen in stores casts more of the limelight on us, even though things has been going really great for us we have only scratched the surface of the total potential player base. So people seeing us more is a big part of it and also getting into other markets. We are so spoiled, I always think about that when I travel, we always forget how great we have it here in Nordic countries with internet connection

A: Not everyone has 100 mbit/s up and down

M: Exactly, exactly! I sit at home with fiber connection and often times I have better connection than really exclusive hotels has in some countries even though they often have the best internet available in their country. I think it is important to give everyone the opportunity to purchase the game.

A: As the Swedish Social Democrats used to say “Include everyone!” (Alla ska med!)

M: Something like that, haha!

A: How will the console versions of Vermintide compare to PC? Is there a risk that one platform becomes favorized?

M: I think that the update pace will be a bit slower on console compared to PC, but that’s mostly due to the submission phase. The goal is to try and keep them all as close to each other as we can, but it is also possible that we won’t update them all at the same time. We will probably gather a few updates and/or DLC in one big update for console, but the goal is to have all three versions being the same.

A: Who was the genius who decided to give away Lead & Gold for free, 150,000 copies?

M: It was quite a few of us, I don’t dare to say, I’m not sure who it actually was. I have wanted to do this for quite some time now but this time it was our marketing and PR department that came up with it. We felt that so many of us wanted to get new players into our games and test them out and it felt good to give away something. I have also been a spokesperson for doing it though this time it was a joint decision. It’s a game that we felt is still good so it was fun to be able to give it away.

A: When can cheap bastards expect to get Vermintide for free?

M: Hehe, that’s a good question, not yet, not yet for a while. It’s interesting because that’s a question about being respectful to those who have already purchased the game, so it’s always a sensitive topic, especially if you do it too soon. We will see, we will work with Vermintide through different forums to reach out to new customers, but completely free will definitely take a while.

A: That’s good to hear! What do your DLC plans look like? Will it be a mix between paid DLC and Free-LC?

M: It will be a mix. We will do another paid DLC soon, but we will try and do a lot of free content as well, our next one will be free. The point is to create and publish new content and try it out and play it. We look at this as a longer project, exactly how we will do it, what gets published when and how and all that is something we are looking into, but we are working with improving the basics and the capacity like managing more users online, building for future updates, making it easier for us to build more content, making it easier to deploy new patches and new DLC is also very important. There’s also a lot of other things I really want to talk about but I’m not allowed to, haha! (A: Haha, I’ll turn off the recording!) But I’ll get back to you when we get closer to those things. We have a lot of things that we are investigating, not just DLC but in every aspect of the game, how to take it to the next level, and that’s something we have to do since we want to keep on working on Vermintide, we are really enjoying it. Then it might also have taken a bit too long and that's something we have to get better at and to get better at it we are building tools which will allow us to internally auto-test things faster and improve the game and in the long run also improve future productions and games. There is a lot to work on and improve on, I mean, we are a small company and suddenly *BANG* and there was a whole lot of players playing and we felt it. Everyone here sat at helpdesk, every single person here sat and tried to answer questions. When you got so many people buying your game and starts playing your game, even when it’s just a small percentage who has issues it still adds up to quite a few and it takes a while to help them all. We once put in 20 hours on just one player’s problem who couldn’t get his game to work and we couldn’t figure out why. Then it turned out that the fans on his computer were broken (A: Haha!) so his computer overheated whenever he tried to play. So when he change fans everything worked. We really wanted to help him as much as we could but it’s difficult, PC games especially. I have another anecdote from even further back, it was the same problem, someone had issues with his game and we didn’t understand what it the problems was. Then we realized that some issues could occur if you, it was Lead & Gold I think, had a home-made USB devices connected while playing, for some reason that cause issues, so one of us asked “What do you have connected in your USB ports?” and he said “I have my home-made flight simulator cockpit that I have built myself” and when he unplugged it everything worked fine. It’s not always that easy to troubleshoot, we have tried via different mediums such as Skype to enable us to talk with our customers to try and help them, but it takes time. All this have also taught us a whole lot about how passionate our players are. We have also fixed many of the issues we used to have and we have learnt a lot for our future updates and games about different types of hardware and how to improve our games, their bases and the technology and all that.

A: Now you have a great foundation to build on.

M: Exactly, it’s really great, and it feels good, and it’s going to be exciting!

A: So you are not allowed to hint about what the next piece of DLC will be about?

M: No not really. There are a few updates coming, and I’m not going to ruin anything because if I do, I’ll probably ruin some plans elsewhere that someone has been working on. Otherwise, it’s a privilege for us CEO:s who are self-financed to leak, we are even joking about how as soon as I talk I leak a whole lot of things, so I’m not gonna do that.

A: I’m going to send this interview to whoever is in charge of media relations, you are so smoked! Internal affairs will have a chat with you!

M: Haha, exactly, I’m smoked! No but we have a lot of content in the pipeline. Traditionally what we look for is what will get people to keep playing and deliver new experiences. We try and look for what the players are experiencing so we can deliver something new. Then we try and look at what people are commenting and giving us feedback on and we are working long-term on a lot of things we want to update, like the loot system, which we have already worked a bit on earlier, there is a lot of variants we are looking into.

A: To round things off, we have talked a lot about Vermintide, development for different consoles, but what is next for Fatshark, how will Fatshark evolve and become even better, Make Fatshark Great Again, you know.

M: Hah, exactly, a lot of it is about staying on the same track, looking at what more we can do within this universe [Warhammer], because we feel that there is a significant interest in the game, and to do it, whatever it will be, as great as we possibly can. We’ll see what happens with the consoles, how the reception is there is. We have a lot of ideas on what we want to do both within Vermintide but also outside of Vermintide but right now we are only focusing in Vermintide, we’ll see what happens later on, that’s an analysis that I will have to do, haha.

A: Well, that’s all I had, this time, thank you for your time and good luck with the release!

M: Thank you very much!

Well, there we have it. Unfortunately, Fatshark is NOT planning on making a Duke Nukem game with Gearbox; we just have to keep on dreaming.

Some people get paid to take the plane from Miami to San Francisco to interview game developers. I took the bus from 15 minutes into town and even had to pay for my bus fee. But maybe that’s how you get a more personal interview; it has worked twice for me, so I guess it works.

When I had turned off my recording device, we talked a bit more. Martin Wahlund said that Fatshark had plans for taking the Vermintide concept and transferring it to Warhammer 40,000, but they ended up scrapping it since there are so many Warhammer 40,000 games coming. Also, Martin enjoyed Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine, so maybe there is hope for a Space Marine 2. There were also talks in the corridors about adding more Chaos elements to Vermintide, I only heard a few sentences while walking, but maybe Vermintide will see a bit more focus on Chaos.

It is not often that I feel confident when talking with developers and listening to their plans but for some reason, I believe in Fatshark, maybe it’s the premium coffee, or maybe it’s because Martin Wahlund is a great, humble, and nice guy.

In case whoever is in charge of media relations is reading this, Martin did not leak anything, I promise! See, Martin, I got your back, no way that they are going to read through all this.