Shiro Games on Its New Publishing Arm & Partnership with Cathay Capital

Introduction

Hi, I'm Nicolas Cannasse, CEO of Shiro Games. I started very early as I was already programming my first games when I was 10, back then it was BASIC on a 12 Mhz CPU and a large 40 MB hard drive.

I entered the industry just after finishing my engineering school where I majored in CS and Management, and created with a friend of mine my first company called Motion-Twin, where we made web and Flash free-to-play games (Motion-Twin would later go on to develop the popular Dead Cells game). 
 
After about 10 years I decided to leave in order to start Shiro Games with Sebastien Vidal as I wanted to focus on creating PC/Console indie games. Since then I’ve acted as Game Director on Evoland 1&2, Northgard and, more recently, Wartales, whilst also having been the president of Shiro for the last 10 years. I'm very happy and proud of all the games we’ve made at Shiro, so it's very difficult to choose one in particular! 

Partnership with Cathay Capital

We‘ve been approached over the past few years by a number of companies both in the videogames industry and also funds who wanted to either invest in or buy Shiro.

We were looking at different options there and we chose Cathay because they understood our values and goals, and also because we were able to get additional funding without losing control of the company (I and Sebastien are still the majority owners).

Cathay provides funding that will allow us to hire additional teams to work on two unannounced games and also help fund our Shiro Unlimited publishing label.

A New Publishing Arm

We launched Shiro Unlimited a few months ago and we work with third-party studios, funding and publishing their games but also providing assistance and support on their art, game design, or technical developments if they need us to. Being an experienced studio ourselves we understand the issues they might face throughout the dev process and we offer our full support during all phases of development.
 
We have people in our team scouting for potential games and contacting studios, but we also receive a lot of direct proposals and demos. We usually make sure to test all of them and give our feedback even when we refuse their games.
 
The important point that we are looking for when starting a partnership is of course the game itself – we need to understand it, like it, and be able to communicate on it. We have published many different games we created in the past (from pixel art JRPG Evoland to Sci-Fi 4X with Dune) so we can handle different genres, but we need to be able to bring additional value to the studio with partners by understanding the target audience and the way to reach it.

And of course, we are always in contact with the team, not only the bosses and heads but also all of the people that will have an important role in the development of the game. Since we are game developers ourselves our goal is to create long-term relationships with other teams, both as a publisher and studio but also between two friendly studios.

Creating a Commercially Successful Game

All of the games we released have been profitable, which is pretty rare in the industry. I think it's very important to understand and work with who your game is made for and how to reach them firmly in mind.

There are so many games released every week and you want your game not to see success and visibility, especially if you've spent years working on it. This is done in traditional ways which can be trailers, announcements, press interviews, and conventions, but also using our extensive knowledge of how to reach specific communities that would be interested in the game in question. 

UA Strategy

We put a lot of effort into researching the audiences and players that we feel our games would resonate with, infiltrating existing community hubs and platforms, studying players ingrained in existing communities, and tailoring our approach and communication around our findings.

Paid user acquisition has not been the main focus of our strategy typically, we are experimenting with it but when you get the message right, the word-of-mouth between and organic reach towards players is much more efficient, and also doesn't cost millions in the marketing budget. Of course, it might vary depending on the kind of games you're making.

Monetization Models

In-game purchases and microtransactions are something we try to avoid, instead preferring the more traditional paid expansions (DLCs) but we also put a lot of emphasis on free updates as well. For example, on Northgard we've released a number of free and paid expansions over the last five years and our community is very supportive of this approach. But from my own experience, if you're going to do in-game purchases it has to be planned in the quite early stages, make sense in your product, and also have the potential to be well received by the players.

COVID's Influence on Shiro Games

We've returned 100% to the office already, with this being something almost the entire team wanted to do. We have a very high degree of daily interaction and cooperation inside our teams so it's important to us to be able to work closely together and in person. It's a choice we made to have this way of working and we understand some might prefer remote or hybrid models, but our teams enjoy and understand our desire to keep this system in place.  

Shiro Games' Roadmap

We have recently released both Wartales and Dune: Spice Wars into Early Access, meaning that we’ll be developing, growing, and improving both games over the coming months until their full releases early next year. Alongside all of that, Northgard will also be seeing a variety of new additions and updates in the years to come and we are also starting to work on some brand new games, which we can’t share any details on at this time but we’re excited to lift the veil on those a little further down the line!

Nicolas Cannasse, CEO of Shiro Games

Interview conducted by Ana Kessler