Fatshark might be one of Sweden’s fastest growing game companies with their recently release Warhammer: End times – Vermintide. They have gone from being subcontractors to being the makers of a games that even chased down Dark Souls 3 as most sold on Steam, six months after it’s release.
Fatshark is located in the city of Stockholm, on Södermalm. Their offices are built in an old factory building and the makers of Angry Birds, Rovio, are their next door neighbors. The office is simple, yet elegant and the high factory ceiling makes it feel even bigger than it is.
They used to be a smaller studio but has now become famous all over the world. Luckily, they agreed to an interview and gave me the opportunity to speak to the CEO and co-founder himself, Martin Wahlund. As Swedish customs dictates, every meeting has to be done over a cup of coffee, so with coffee in hand we headed into a conference room and started talking about the success that is Vermintide.
The whole conversation was translated from Swedish to English by yours truly.
Here we see Martin holding the Zweihander
Atle (A): Let’s start at the beginning. You were pretty much a subcontractor to Grin, but they went under in 2009. How close was Fatshark to going under with them?
Martin (M): It’s hard to say how close we were, of course it affected us in a negative way when our biggest “customer” went under. It was also a bit sad, we had a lot of friends who worked there, it’s never fun when a company files for bankruptcy. Thankfully everyone landed on their feet in different ways with Starbreeze and different companies. They are hired all over the gaming industry in Stockholm now.
A: That was the past, now we are sitting here with success that is Vermintide. Where did the idea of making a Warhammer game come from? Was it you guys who came up with the idea or was it the guys at Games Workshop who contacted you?
M: It was our idea, actually. It started with a few of us working at Amuze, the company who created Headhunter Redemption more than a few years ago, and during that time we played an extreme amount of Warhammer Fantasy Battle together during the evenings after work hours and on weekends. It became our watering hole outside of work, because we worked a lot of overtime back then, it was before Fatshark even existed. We were a consult firm back then who created AI, me (Martin), Rickard, Joakim, and Johan, the founders. I met a lot of people who work here now and we all played Warhammer just for the fun of it. We had no capital and not a lot of experience in the business, we had only worked a few years in the industry. Over time, we felt like it would be fun to create a Warhammer game, but then it didn’t happen much more on that front. We have worked a lot along the road and made bigger and bigger projects. We’ve learnt a lot, the company has grown, we have recruited a lot of people, and quite a few here play Warhammer on their spare time. A few years ago our Creative Director, Anders, asked — we were talking about new IPs at the time — “is it okay if i send something to Games Workshop?” and I said “Go for it!” They took the bait immediately and we flew over and they liked what we showed and talked about and we just went with it. That’s how it started.
A: It was natural progression?
M: Yes, and I think it is part of our success, many of us loves Warhammer so it hasn’t been hard to decide our vision for the game or the feeling of it, it was pretty easy. If you come up with something from scratch, let’s say a post-apocalyptic game, it can mean so much. You get one picture, I get another. Warhammer already has so many characters, games, and such to look at.
A: You don’t have to start from scratch.
M: Exactly! It really helps a lot.
A: Why did it come down to Vermintide? Why pick that specific type of game?
M: We have done many multiplayer versus games, and my opinion is that we like those types of games, we think they are fun, and we are going to do them again. But if we are going to bet on a self published game like we did, we wanted to do it on our own. When talking about multiplayer versus, you need a whole lot of resources because those types of gamer really want to win, they want the absolute best, they want to be the absolute best. Then you get games like Counter Strike, League of Legends. Those gamers can’t really play ten games at a time because they won’t be the best at them, they pick one or maybe two games at an absolute maximum. So we looked at games like those and decided to look a different way.
We like coop, it is fun and it is close to our hearts, we had Lead and Gold, an old game we made, where we had a lot of synergy effects between the players, the cooperative was important for us. We went back to our roots, we felt that it was something we were good at, we also knew that Total War were more suited to make the classic Warhammer game, they are good at what they are doing, it was more within their competence profile.
Then the choice to pick Skaven was because they are a fun race, they aren’t in many other games, and the fit very well because we wanted a ton of enemies. When we looked at this at the beginning I had a few reference points that I really wanted to be included. One was like in Lord of the Rings, at the start, where Sauron is sweeping and people are flying all over the place, I jokingly said “it would be nice if you could get that feel where the enemies are flying in that way” and we actually managed that pretty well.The other thing was how we were supposed to create a party that pretty powerful. Look at the characters we have in Vermintide, the characters are heroes, but they are always greatly outnumbered, like on Lord of the Rings when they go into Moria, it’s an all-star team with Gandalf the rest but it is still quite challenging because there are so many enemies like in the cave scene where they are just flowing down the walls. That was the picture we had in mind, that’s how we wanted Vermintide to be like. That’s why we made it like we did, we are also playing a lot of these types of games and it is much easier to design games you want to play yourself, it is always hard to make something you don’t really like or is in a gener you usually don’t play.
A: Once again, it was a natural choice, natural progression for Fatshark?
M: Yea, it was a natural thing, it was what we loved doing, that’s a big lesson for us and everyone, when you develop a game you love to do then it usually ends up being a great game. Or most of the time, the chance is bigger anyways.
A:When did you think that you’d reach such a high number of 500,000+ sold game? Is something that you even think about?
M: I have to think about it, it’s about the future for us.
A: Is it something the team thinks about?
M: Yes, we made it clear to them that this was the first step to keep building on what makes it even more important to get a good start. Though we said that even if we sold much much less that planned we should continue to work on this concept to keep building things like a community, more functions, and similar. Of course, we looked at other similar games and, unfortunately, you mostly find the really big games so you benchmark against them and it builds high hopes. These sales were in the positive end of the spectrum, if Vermintide got successful it would hit the numbers we are at today. So we hit my estimates for sales, well we did go a bit over my estimated. We knew that we had to hit certain parameters like Metacritic, if the reviews are positive it will go well, even though I’m not a the biggest fan of Metacritic. We knew that if we get a ranking of about 80 with the popular genre we have we knew we had a good chance to sell a lot of games as well.
A: You were even chasing Dark Souls down on Steam!
M: Yes, that was crazy! I saw it yesterday during the sale, we were on second place, behind Dark Souls. It felt really great actually.
A: What does the future hold for Vermintide? With things like DLC, free updates, and even a Vermintide 2.
M: What we are looking at now is that we want to keep on building on this universe. For us what it ends up being is not that important, what is important is that we do it in a nice way for the players. There two things to consider. On the one hand you need to make money to be able to keep on building because it costs a lot to build games. You need a business idea that will work. The thing other is to make sure that the players are happy and gets new things. We are trying to mix free and paid content.
Update number two comes at the end of May. I’m not sure about all the dates and what I’m allowed to talk about yet, but a lot things will come to the game.
In the long run we just want to keep on building on the franchise we have. We are still only working on Vermintide. Whether it grows to new game modes, expansions, and such we’ll see in the future. We have a pretty detailed plan that we follow, we can’t tell much about it but at least we have one.
We are trying to follow the forums and see what the players are saying, what they want, what we should change, so we are just listening to what the community wants.
Here we see Martin Wahlund overseeing development
A: Apropos keeping the players happy, microtransactions, is that something you guys are thinking about implementing?
M: We have said that we aren’t going to start with it. Personally I don’t mind them, they can work, but to have them they need to work with the game. They can’t be intrusive, they can’t change it to pay-to-win, and there are many other factors to think about. I don’t mind them, as long as the game experience is the same and it feels good, sure you can have them, but we have no plans on adding them as of now.
A: In your opinion, how has Fatshark changed as a company, now with Vermintide? You guys are famous all over the world now, not just here in Sweden or Europe.
M: Great question, really great question. The big change is that for example when we were a GDC walking around in our merchandise people came up to us and said “hey, we are playing your new game” and they came from one of the big companies that are making the games that we ourselves are playing at home. It really felt great, it gave us all a boost, especially for everyone who works on the team, they worked really hard to create this, games are hard work. I don’t really want to say that it is a culture with games, it just feels weird, but everything that gets reviewed is hard to make. You are putting yourself out there and you’ve invested so much in the product, and sometimes you don’t get the right conditions due to a small budget, the one in charge makes strange decisions, so often you feel like you didn’t manage to make it as good as you wanted to. In this case we knew that is was going to be tough and we only had ourselves, it was our responsibility, we couldn’t blame a publisher or anyone else, it was solely on ourselves to make this as good as possible. When it then turns out to go well you feel all the tensions going away, what we believed in worked. You get braver and you dare to do more things.
A: Could you say that some sort of hubris has been built here?
M: No, there is no risk for hubris here! It’s enough that we see one negative community post.
A: You guys are too Swedish for that?
M: We are way too Swedish for this unfortunately, I wouldn’t mind being a bit more American in that sense and just enjoy the moment. I jokingly said to the team that we should just enjoy this but it always turn to “oh no, this user has this problem, we have to fix it!” so we keep forgetting to enjoy the moment.
When we get sales numbers like this on PC there’s always some kind of hardware configuration that doesn’t work and that takes time to fix. We don’t have the resources to try every single hardware configuration on our games before launch. So we keep finding that like “this old graphics card with this new CPU or mouse doesn’t work with our game”. We have to fix that over time but it takes a while to do it. But hubris is the last thing we'll get unfortunately, or unfortunately, it’s good that we don’t have hubris but we need to keep pepping each other and realize that we have done something great. It’s first when we go to conventions that we really see what we have done, when we are sitting here at the office we only see what is not working and not the great thing we have built.
A: So what does the future hold for Fatshark? Can we expect more big license games or will Fatshark return to making its own things again?
M: Our main focus is to keep working on Vermintide and we will keep working on those types of games. If we look at what Vermintide is today it is where it is because many gamers loves co-op games and many love fantasy games like Skyrim and such. It’s in that area where we will stay for the foreseeable future.
We were actually going to start on some new productions as fast as possible, but since Vermintide has done so well we decided to keep working on it. It’s so easy to just start on a new project and you get so invested and forget to take care of your old games. Since the console versions are coming soon Vermintide will get even bigger for us.
A: On your website it said that you were looking for a Senior Character Artist,is that something you can tell us about what he will be working on?
M: Well, okay, it is to make more characters basically.
A: So more characters will come to Vermintide?
M: Definitely! New enemies, new playable characters and such. That’s what we are working on now and it is really fun, it’s an interesting process. It takes a while to build new characters so you have to start in time. People are like “come on, just throw in a new character!” but you have to build the character, you rig them, animate them, make an AI for it, so it takes a lot of time. If we are going to release a new character then it will take a few months to get it done, and then there is testing and all that.
A: Speaking of characters, I was in your forums and some community members wanted to be able to play with all five characters in one game. Is that too many or are there other reasons for locking it at four?
M: We haven’t really thought about it, we played with the thought of having six players at once, but during testing we settled on four since it played best and it felt good. The main thought with having a fifth extra character, when only four are played, was when you get in as the last player in a party there is always two to chose from. If I, for example don’t like a sniper, an elf, and someone that is really fast there will always be a slower I can pick instead, or the other way around. Of course, if we add a bunch of characters further on we might enable more characters in the same game, but I think a lot of it comes from the tradition of playing four at once, everything works and it is balanced. For every player you add the higher are the chances that someone leaves. We don’t have anything against having five players at once, but as of now we don’t have any plans for adding that.
A: When will those of us who loves playing on consoles be able to play Vermintide?
M: We haven’t announced it yet. In the coming weeks we’ll have a few announcements about it. What I can share about the consoles are that we have been working on them at the same time as the PC version, it’s not that we started with it later on. We decided that we did not want to just make a port, we wanted to make a well polished console game, it will be with the Vermintide feeling but made for consoles. There’s a lot to consider, like how fast you move a character, how fast he turns, to aim, the melee, the pacing, it all works differently when playing with a controller on a console than it does when playing with mouse and keyboard… And of course, making sure that the game works with a controller as well! We want people to be able to pick up the game and understand it quickly.
A: Is there any chance for crossplay between the different versions? Or is that up to Microsoft and Sony?
M: For us it won’t be too hard to make that, of course it will be a lot of work, but the problem is maintenance. We want to maintain the game on all platforms. If we have it on too many platforms then we have to update and maintain them all at the same time, every update will be a huge project. If one platform goes out of sync with the others then it won't be able to play with the other two platforms. To maintain a crossplay game is my biggest fear, that’s what worries me most.
A: But the will is there?
M: Yes, we have talked about it earlier, but it’s nothing that we are looking at doing now or in the foreseeable future. We have played internally console vs PC, so it can be done. The problem is that the game will feel different. It could end up being easier for one of the other platforms, so there are many factors to consider.
A: That was all I had. Thank you for your time!
M: Thank you as well!
One cup of coffee later and we now know a bit more about Vermintide as a game and Fatshark as a company than we did before. And I got a new pair of socks.
