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.

A: What were the biggest differences between developing for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, or was there even anything significant?

M: There weren’t any significant differences really, they were pretty similar in my opinion. There are some technical differences of course and some differences in philosophy on each platform, but they felt pretty similar. We developed them both at the same time, there are some hardware differences, as everyone knows.

A: Will there be any differences between Vermintide on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One? Or will they be identical?

M: They will both be identical. We chose to try and make all platforms as identical as possible. There is a discussion to be had here; many publishers have many different version with unique features and such and it is possible that we might add a little something, but as it stands today, both versions are the same so that everyone gets the same experience no matter the platform they are playing.

A: What’s your opinion on PlayStation 4 Pro and Project Scorpio? Are you for all these 1.5 consoles?

M: It’s exciting! I haven’t had the time think too much about it, but it’s interesting. We want to support our game the all the way, so for us, it means making sure that the game works on the base console and then you can upscale for the new consoles. It’s an exciting development; we just have to wait and see what happens. I’m not sure if this will bring any changes for us since we want to support the old generations, so I see no issues, it’s a positive thing, they are stronger machines, it’s nice. As long as they don’t change the architecture completely, so you get the old Nokia phenomenon with thirty million different screen resolutions and all that, but the risk of that happening can’t be that high.

A: Haha, hopefully! We talked a bit about cross-play last time I was here, is Fatshark’s stance still the same?

M: No, we have not added it. We have thought about it, and it’s not hard to do, technically speaking, the thing is keeping up with updates, it would force us to update all platforms at the same time. It’s not impossible that we might add it sometime in the future, we have to wait and see.

One of the most difficult things with games, like I talked a bit about, is updating and testing and all that. We would have to update our backend, our clients on all the different platforms, and if an update were not to pass or get through the submission phase that console has, we would need to have everything synced perfectly and the mean much more work. It is possible that we might get there one day but as a smaller company, it is another step which is quite messy. We might give it a try in the future, but we have no plans for it at the moment.

A: Fatshark’s current size makes it too much of a hassle?

M: I think we can pull it off in due time but like I said, with all the updates (A: precisely, they need to roll out) we have to push out, all the patches need to roll out, we need to get our new content out, we have built some content that still hasn’t been released since we haven’t had the time to test it.

For us it’s about catching up, to release everything that we have built and after that, it’s things like that that takes time so let us say for example that the PS4 and Xbox versions can handle an update but PC can’t, if that happens then you need to hold back the PS4 and Xbox versions while PC catches up or the other way around, the risk there is that you might end up never releasing updates and it becomes an even bigger hassle than it already is. That might probably be the biggest argument against cross-play, the argument for cross-play is like you said, multiplayer game, play with each other.

We have also made some changes on console that doesn’t exist on PC to make Vermintide “better” on console since it is a different medium and you play at a different tempo; you don’t play the same on console as on PC when you move, shoot enemies, and such. We have tweaked the console versions to make them feel as good as possible, so it’s no longer the same game which can make it unbalanced and unfair when playing with PC players. Though playing with Xbox and PlayStation would be fair and balanced, I think it would work with PC, but it’s a bit more of a balancing act.

A: Vermintide has been a real success for Fatshark, a real lift for the company. Have there been any offers for some of the bigger publishers like EA, Ubisoft, and all those players?

M: That’s something that you’re not allowed to talk about in interviews, but of course, the interest in the company has increased a lot, and that’s is great, and it also opens up new possibilities. For us, part of the success with Vermintide was that we decided to put the player in focus, we were going to do as great of a game as we could, and the rest would follow, and it’s great that it paid off, so that is what we will keep on doing.

We will see, if we find a partner who will allow us to make better games then we can discuss it, but we don’t want to get into a situation where we will have to compromise on game quality. That is not fun, hehe. I have been in the industry for so long so it has to be fun, the day it stops being fun you have to start doing something else, it’s supposed to be fun, and you’re meant to work close to the players. One of the benefits of being independent is that you can be more transparent, you can say what’s on your mind, you can be more open to players and say “this, and that will happen.”

But it is also a problem, like now, you say something, and then something else happens, and then you got to delay, and people get disappointed at you, but we are trying to be as transparent as possible.

A: So when you were down in Barcelona at DICE 2016 with Randy Pitchford from Gearbox, it was not to plan a new Duke Nukem game by Fatshark?

M: Hahaha, no! Randy is a pleasant person, fantastic guy all around, and I highly respect him and his work. But we were mostly having fun and had a lot of discussions with guys like Hilmar from CCP; he had a great introductory talk, and he talked about the visions and gaming as a whole.

We are living in exciting times. Games have become something bigger than they have ever been, and I am not talking financially, I am talking about what you can do. VR, it is pushing technology, it is pushing ideas forward, it is pushing the development of AI. There is a lot of cool stuff happening that you might not see when you’re sitting in the middle of it all, it’s not just that one game. We are pushing things like VR and AI forwards, it’s pretty cool when you think about it, and it drives you to make even bigger projects that are even more advanced, it’s very inspiring.

A: Back in the day it used to be the military who pushed technology forwards, now it’s the gaming industry.

M: Yes, exactly, now it’s the gaming industry. Nowadays the gaming industry is helping more and more and more when it comes to advancing things. That’s also the thing with it being financially viable; the advancements become even more efficient. It’s really awesome; it’s great!

A: Appropo VR, VR is a big phenomenon these days, what do you think about the future of VR, is it here to stay?

M: VR is here to stay, absolutely, but I don’t think anyone can tell exactly what it will be used for. It is something we are keeping up to date with and informed on and are working with and learning and such. But it will take a while until it is financially viable to sell as a consumer product, the computers need to become cheaper and also be able to run VR, the headsets needs to become more user-friendly, the cords needs to go away eventually.

Something that I think we will see a lot of early, which we already see today, is VR experiences, to experience places and such, that’s something I believe will be cool. We will probably also see VR conferences which will make them quite efficient. There will also be coming a lot of cool VR content for games as well, but we have to wait and see what will happen. What makes this so interesting is that it is big players who are investing in VR.

I think that commercially VR is a few years away before it becomes viable. I also believe that it’s important to follow the development so you know what’s happening so you have the competence to work with it and push the technology forward. It a pretty cool concept, it’s a special feeling to sit in it, but I don’t think you can sit for too many hours because otherwise, you’ll get a headache. I never get motion sickness but after sitting for 45 – 60 minutes I started to get tired and felt like I needed a break from it, there’s a lot of impressions all at once.

One of the surprise hits on PC last year is about to release on console, and that gave us here at GameZone an excuse to visit developer Fatshark again, and who are we to pass up an opportunity like that?!

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide was one of last year's surprise hits on PC, it chased down Dark Souls 3 six months after Vermintide’s initial release on Steam, and managed to sell over 500.000 copies in half a year. Now console players will be able to get their hands on this Left 4 Dead-inspired fantasy-style, rat-slaying, first-person-shooter/melee game.

Recently, a lot of multiplatform games have released with one of the versions being awful. Vermintide's CEO, Martin Wahlund, took the time to assure us and eager fans that Vermintide won’t be another Arkham Knight on PC, Vermintide will be a good console game and not just another port.

So, with premium coffee from a premium coffee machine placed inside a premium factory building on Södermalm in Stockholm, Sweden, in hand, a very serious CEO and an even more serious journalist sat down and had a serious chat about Vermintide, PlayStation 4 Pro, VR, and the future of Fatshark. The interview was done in a three square meter gaming room which should be called “The Chamber of Inspiration.” For it's hidden behind a wall of Warhammer figurines and a can of Swedish Surströmming (Google it), and in this room they “test” various games for “inspiration.” It’s hard work making games.

Also, the coffee at Fatshark is better than what they serve at Paradox, sorry guys.

Without further ado, join Martin Wahlund and me for an engaging and in-depth interview about a little bit of everything.

The whole interview was conducted in Swedish and was translated into English by me, beware of mistakes!

Atle: Let’s starts with a not so serious question: if you had to pick any game that has already been developed to be developed by Fatshark instead, what would that game be?

Martin Wahlund: Everquest.

A: Alright, now we can start with the serious stuff. It has been about six months since I was here last and a lot has happened, more importantly, Vermintide has been announced for consoles, which is one of the main reasons I am here, can you tell us a little about the process behind the console release?

M: Yes, the console release is a bit special, for one we decided to separate them (the PC and console versions) to enable us to focus on making it a console game. Vermintide played quite well on console to start with, but there is always things you want to push a bit further, polish a bit more, work more with the controller input, UI, and all that to make everything feel like it was made for consoles. I mean, Vermintide has a big melee focus, something we are grateful for, which is something that works well with a controller, for example, that’s one of the great things about it.

The process has taken much more time than we anticipated, and longer to get it out that we thought. We thought we would be able to release Vermintide much quicker, but we haven’t been happy about the status Vermintide has been in until now, so we waited until we felt that the game was ready to be played.

A: So it’s a bit difficult to develop from PC to console?

M: No, it’s not really difficult, it’s easier than it has ever been, back in the day it was much more challenging, for us, it’s mostly about the gameplay aspect. You have to think about that there are different types of players, and they play in a variety of ways, of course, that’s easy to forget. In one case you sit with mouse and keyboard in front of a PC monitor alone, and in the other, you sit on a sofa with a controller with a bit more distance to the screen you’re playing on.

That’s a few of the things you need to consider. And of course, the input, menus, the interface, and such. Then there are things we discovered during development that we want to improve on from the PC version, things we felt weren’t that sound from the PC version, things we could improve to make the game better, and these improvements have been implemented in both the console and PC versions.

So there’s that as well, it’s not just purely console related stuff, we want to make general improvements. We have also added much more content than we had on PC, more maps, like the two DLC packs that have been released on PC already. We are trying to keep both versions as close to each other as possible when it comes to content.

A: So it takes time because you want to make a console game and not just a fast…

M: Exactly! We don’t want to make a port! That’s the most important thing for us not to do; It’s not supposed to feel like a port where we cut corners. Because sometimes when you play a game, you feel it, often it’s on PC where it feels like everything was made for consoles and that’s pretty bad. Sure, it’s more work, but compared to making a whole new game it’s not that much. It’s mostly testing, test the game, make sure you get the right feeling. To make the features usually goes pretty quick, what takes time is to make everything feel right.

A: Like you said, there are a few bad examples when it comes to porting games, like Arkham Knight on PC, what are the dangers with making the same game on different platforms.

M: Haha, I’m not sure really, it’s mostly that you don’t adapt the game for the platform. There’s a whole lot of dangers, and they all are on different levels. When you go from PC to console, it’s still hardcore gamers, but if you go from lets' say a tablet or Set-Top box TV or something like that there are bigger differences. On a tablet or a phone, you can’t have long game sessions because sometimes you get a phone call so you can’t have a game where you must play 30 minutes otherwise your progress will be lost. But when you go from PC to console the big difference is the feeling of the game; you can feel what platform the game was made for.

A: I was browsing your forums, and it seems like the PC players feel like there hasn’t been a lot of new content lately, what do you have to say to them?

M: We have worked quite a bit with PC content and recently we have worked with future-proofing and upgrading our background systems. We had a pretty aggressive schedule for new content, but we have felt that there have been things we want to improve, and we have put in the time and focus on building for the future as well. I would say that there is much to come.

The thing with working with game development is that you have this big system, and you are working in different branches of development, and you have to get everything as tight as possible, and there has also been a lot of testing to make sure that everything is tested and works as intended. So there’s a lot of new content on the way for PC as well within the next few months. It gives us time to test everything, and a lot of the improvements that have been implemented on consoles will also be coming to PC as well.

There will be more content for PC, of course, we have at least, or I shouldn’t say too much otherwise the production will get mad at me, but we have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline. And then there is the fact that we are a small team, sometimes we underestimate how much it takes to create new content. We aren’t like some of the big publishers or developers where they can build a lot of DLC simultaneously, have them ready at launch, and then sit on them and release them over time.

We worked on getting everything we had ready for launch and after that we could start building, which isn’t the best since we want to release content earlier than we did. I even said that I wanted the first big DLC one month after launch and then try and have new content each month, that was the goal. The thing is, you may be able to build but it is hard to test it all, you don’t want to release broken content, you want to avoid that.

The process is to take it from an idea to produce it, test it, balance it, and release it because we don’t want to ruin the game either because that’s also a classic move when you update a game wildly, and it ends up ruining the game. But we have become better at it, and I hope that in the future we will be able to have a better plan and be able to communicate better.

The problem is that we don’t always know when we will be ready. We are working as hard as we can so we have said that “it should be done,” but then we discover a bug that we can’t look past so we have to fix it before we go live, and that makes the whole process more time-consuming.

Generally, it’s something we are working on, becoming better at releasing content, I would have loved to release more content, maybe even more experimental content, but we are getting there. But it has to feel right and needs to be made as good as possible. PC players are our core and heart, those we have worked with and have bought the game, so of course, we will keep on supporting them, there’s no discussion about it, it is very important for us.

We also want to become more transparent than we already are, we try and be transparent but the problem with being transparent is that you say things you believe and then things happen and circumstances change and of course people get disappointed, and I understand that. We are still working really hard with the game, we were about to start with a different project, but we still haven’t started it, we are still focusing 100 percent on Vermintide.

A: They will probably be pleased to hear that! Is there any worry from your side about releasing such a multiplayer focused game on console considering that games like Titanfall and Evolve died pretty fast?

M: No, we haven’t worried about it that much really. Hmm, how should I put it… Of course, multiplayer is always high risk but making multiplayer games is also high reward since it’s fun to play together and to have a player base. The good thing about consoles is that the player base builds up over time. And there is also various methods of getting new players into the game, and we are working with that on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

But of course, it’s always something to worry about when making multiplayer. It’s always a concern that “oh, there’s no one playing” but the advantage we have is that you only need four players, you will be able to play as long as there are four players who want to jump in and play. That’s the thing, there doesn’t have to be 100,000 people online for us to be able to play the game, and if you want only to play two-player with bots, then that also works, even if it’s more fun to play with other players.

A: So that’s not something you have given much thought?

M: No not really, what we have thought about this is to have bots so if you want to start the game on your own, then you should be able to until someone jumps into your game.