Some of the offers were actually offensive” – How Clutch found its publisher

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In This Edition,
Maverick’s Mike Brown and Harinder Sangha on…

• Being dumped by Amazon

• Finding Focus

• Fighting Forza

• Becoming the best game studio in the world

Earlier this year, we received word that Amazon was abandoning its project with UK studio Maverick Games.

Maverick was founded by leaders of the Forza Horizon series, including creative director Mike Brown. It had been working on an ambitious racing title called Clutch, but Amazon shifted its strategy and walked away from the project.

“Hopefully it doesn’t make me seem stupid now, but we really bought into the vision,” Brown says on today’s The Game Business Show. “They are exceptionally well funded, and their remit was to become the biggest AAA publisher. I liked that.

“They pitched what their whole portfolio would look like. Tomb Raider, the Lord of the Rings game. [MMO] New World was making money. And there were a few other things. They had also acquired MGM and an absolute treasure chest of IP. They sold us on a dream of where Clutch would fit into that. It made complete sense.

“We absolutely believed that within Amazon Games, we probably would be their biggest game. We probably will have a bigger audience than Tomb Raider based on historical performance. I hope that doesn’t bite me in the ass, by the way.”

“It feels silly now that I bought into that dream.”

After receiving the news that Amazon was backing away, I contacted Maverick COO Harinder Sangha for a comment. I was expecting an anxious phone call, but what I got was someone far more upbeat. It transpired that Amazon had basically fully funded Clutch and handed it back to the studio.

“We had very different reactions because Mike was like, ‘Huh. Okay,” remembers Sangha.

Brown adds: “I ain’t that guy, Chris, I don’t get concerned about this stuff.”

Sangha again: “When you told me, I was like, ‘Oh god. We’re going to have to pivot and start thinking about the long term’. That was the instant reaction.”

Back to Brown: “Harinder is so conventional, she’d have already been thinking about redundancies.”

Sangha: “Oh, don’t say that.”

Brown: “I knew the terms of our deal very well. The timing of it was really favorable in terms of the commercials. I knew that we got all the rights back. I knew that they just lose everything. So, the conversation where I’m basically being dumped, I’m like, ‘this is going to be good’. They’re breaking up with you, but you get to keep the house and the car. And the dog.”

“There were publishers that thought, ‘We can absolutely take advantage of these guys’.”

Maverick still wanted a publisher. So, it took Clutch back out to market. But Brown and Sangha were somewhat surprised by the offers that came its way.

“As an independent developer… I think there were publishers that thought, ‘Right, we can absolutely take advantage of these guys,’ Sangha says. “Even sometimes coming out with a rev share that was less favorable to our first deal, which is nuts, considering we didn’t need any dev funding. We were quite taken back.”

Brown continues: “We presented it like, ‘this game is great. It is finished. This is the schedule. There are no notable risks. You can check over everything.’ We came into it completely confident. As Harinder says, we’re not asking for any dev funding, just publishing services. And there was an option where we just say no to everybody and self-publish. That’s how I wanted them to feel. ‘We don’t need you.’ But, some of the offers were actually offensive.”

Sangha quips: “I just want to take the moment to say to all these publishers, we’ll be really happy to speak to you again with our next project.”

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A new Focus

Maverick did find a home for Clutch in the form of Space Marine 2 publisher Focus Entertainment.

“Focus was someone that we spoke to way back before we signed our first deal. At that time, their business didn’t really stretch to the level of spend that we were looking for,” Brown explains.

“They’re not the biggest publisher, but they do consistently deliver quality, and they do consistently overperform. And with a company like that, we know that we’ll be one of, if not the, biggest thing they have going on. If you plug into a much larger, maybe American, publisher, sometimes there’s just no way that you can be the most important thing to them. They might have clocked us as being a bit of guaranteed money-making because there’s so little cost. But that’s not really what we want. Even before signing, Focus had very senior people spending a full week in the game, and they kept playing afterwards. They’re taking it really seriously.”

Sangha adds: “It might sound obvious that somebody plays the game, but quite often they don’t. They just don’t. And it’s important to us. We’re a developer, it’s our game, it’s our first, it’s our own IP. It’s really important that people are invested in it as much as we are.”

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Another company that’s come knocking on Maverick’s door is, surprisingly, Amazon. After dropping the title, the new leadership of Amazon Games told us in July that it’s interested in signing the project, this time for the Luna streaming platform. Maverick says it’s a still a “live conversation”, so was unable to offer an update. And in today’s podcast, I liken the situation to someone buying a house, giving it back to the original owners, and then asking to rent a room.

“They could have had it if they wanted, they didn’t have to dump us,” Brown shrugs.

Taking on Forza

It’s inevitable that Clutch will be compared to Forza Horizon, the industry’s market leading racing game. Like Forza, Clutch is an open world racer set in a beautiful location. And much of the team had cut their teeth on the hit Xbox series.

“I obviously know that Forza audience very well. I know what they like, and I know what they’ve not been able to get out of that game,” Brown says.

“We’re not so silly as to claim that we’re going to kill Forza Horizon. Any game maker where their pitch is to usurp the dominant market leader, that’s really high risk. If we swap genres and said, ‘we’re going to kill Call of Duty,’ no one’s going to give you money to do that because it’s stupid. You can’t kill Call of Duty. There is like five separate studios, some of the best game makers in the world, a budget of untold millions and a huge audience.

“But those Call of Duty players, they can buy a second game. So, you need to see what fantasies are not being fulfilled by what they’re currently playing. Clutch was always intended to be complementary to Forza.

“There’s obviously gameplay in our game that is similar, you still drive beautiful cars around gorgeous environments, but Forza’s never really been about character and story. It’s something that that franchise has historically been fairly weak on. But it’s a thing that people love. Adding that in to this genre in a way that, strangely, hadn’t really been done - certainly not recently, and certainly not well - I think has really broad appeal.”

“We’re not so silly as to claim that we’re going to kill Forza Horizon”

I find racing games tricky to predict. I’ve seen titles like F1, Need for Speed, Grid, Test Drive and so on post huge numbers, only for their sequels to do significantly worse. But Forza Horizon is an outlier, as each new iteration sells in huge quantities.

“Forza Horizon offers a very base fantasy. The one-line descriptor of a Forza Horizon game is ‘it’s a festival of music and cars in a country’. The one-liner of that is really crisp, and has a very broad appeal. Now, the game backs that up. It’s got incredible graphics, loads of cars, great gameplay, great social features. But the one-line pitch of it is good enough to get your interest. That’s also true for The Crew. The Crew is: ‘We built all of America and you can drive across it.’ That’s the pitch. And straight away, you’re like, ‘That sounds interesting.’ And then they back it up with all the other stuff..

“Then you get into some other games where the one-liners are a bit more complicated. What is the one-liner for Grid? It’s a bit harder to grasp that. Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, what is it? Drive around Hong Kong? Hong Kong’s cool, but I don’t think it has the same holiday vibe. ‘I’d bloody love to go drive around Hong Kong.’ No one’s said that. It’s not Forza Horizon 6, where it’s like, ‘Do you want to drive around Japan?’ ‘Bloody yes I do.’”

As for licensed racing games, Brown has an opinion on those, too.

“To be a person that’s going to go buy a Formula 1 game, you have to be somebody that watches Formula 1 on TV,” he says. “There’s no casual passerby who doesn’t really bother with Formula 1 that’s going to [buy it].

“We saw this was when Dirt became WRC. Dirt had peaks and troughs, but it’s a decent game that’s had some big hits. And actually, as an IP, it can reach a casual audience. But as soon as you attach the WRC license, it’s now a bit serious. It’s like, ‘well, I don’t watch WRC. I don’t know who the drivers are.’ The audience actually shrinks to just the people who watch WRC on TV versus the people that played Colin McRae on the PS2 when they were a kid. Attaching an IP can actually tighten the audience rather than expand it.”

“Best game developer in the world”

We ended our conversation with Maverick with the question we always ask: where would you like to be in ten years? And the answer was characteristically ambitious.

“I want gamers to consider us one of, if not the, best game developer in the world,” Brown says. “That’s what I’m shooting for.”

Sangha adds: “I want to make the industry a better place. I want us to have an impact in the industry. I want people to learn good practices here and take that on into other places.”

Brown concludes: “The first step on achieving really remarkable, sometimes potentially impossible, things, is just saying you’re going to do it and meaning it. We hold ourselves back because we don’t want to sound stupid. But if you say it with conviction, and you believe it, then the thought that follows is, ‘what would you need to do to make that real?’ Then the ball’s rolling. It’s happening.”

That’s it for today’s edition of The Game Business. We’ll be back later in the week with the latest industry news, trends and data. Until then, thank you for reading.