Bringing Games to New Players

Hi there! My name is Axel, and I work at one of our Swedish offices in the town of Linköping as a part of the Resolution Tech team. We are a small team with a couple of distinct responsibilities. First off, we maintain and support the older games in Resolution Games’ catalog, such as Bait! - which we added multiplayer to last year as a part of the Fishin’ Buddies update. The second of these responsibilities is bringing our games to new audiences, new devices/platforms and new geographic regions, which is what I will be shedding some light on today. Personally, most of my experience at Resolution Games has involved bringing our games to Pico, hence why large parts of this post will focus on that platform specifically.

The importance of being on multiple platforms

For a bit of clarification, a platform is an ecosystem with its own store, accounts, and hardware devices. An example would be the Meta Quest platform with its Quest store and Meta accounts currently accessible from the original Quest, Quest 2, and Quest Pro stand-alone devices. 

As a VR/AR games studio, we work with numerous platform partners in a market that is constantly changing. For instance, as of writing this, the Meta Quest 2 isn’t even three years old, the Pico headsets are even younger and there are multiple new headsets released each year. Needless to say, there’s a lot to keep up with, and in order to stay relevant as a studio and with our games, it’s imperative that we are in front of the correct players.

A clear example of the importance of bringing our games to new platforms in order to stay relevant and in front of new players is Bait!. While it is now an iconic launch title for the Quest, Bait! was already three years old when the platform was released. Since Bait! was initially made for Samsung Gear VR, a headset that only has one controller and only tracks the rotation of the headset and the controller, the game had to be reworked when it launched for the Quest to add free movement support for both hands and your head.

By making these updates to optimize gameplay and porting it over to Quest, Bait! - which was already one of the most downloaded VR titles - was exposed to the even larger audience that the Quest platform would come to attract (and the game now has more than 10M downloads!). 

And there’s no telling what the next big hit in terms of XR platforms will be. Last fall Pico made big waves in Europe after releasing the Pico 4, and recently the highly anticipated PlayStation VR2 was released. Making sure our games are available on these platforms not only makes them available to the players currently on the platforms, but also to the many additional players who will be on them in the future.

Bringing Games to New Regions

But being in front of players doesn’t just mean being concerned about platforms. It’s about where the players are based as well. As a studio based in Sweden, a country with a rather small population of just over 10 million, we have always made games for other geographical regions - primarily the western market. There are other markets, however, that the platforms of the west do not reach, and these markets have their own rules and conditions. These can be both practical restrictions and policies regarding internet communication. The internet connections between some markets and the west are not only slow but also unreliable as they can get completely closed at times. Many online services are also not available in every market. This means that when bringing our games to certain markets, we’ve had to make certain changes, such as making them single-player experiences without any online functionalities (including in-app purchases which can also be restricted). Even when bringing multiplayer games to these markets, they have had to be contained within their own isolated multiplayer environments. This is why many of our games that we have brought to some platforms in the past currently appear so different to their Steam or Quest counterparts. 

For example, if you look at our games on Pico headsets when they launched vs. today, you’ll see that we had to make some changes to accommodate the Chinese market specifically. However, since Pico began selling headsets in Europe, we’ve been able to treat the western Pico market like we would any other platforms in this region. This is why Ultimechs has been the same game on Steam, Quest, and Pico since its release, and why Blaston since it was released on Pico has likewise been feature-complete when compared to other platforms. Since the recent 1.28 update, we can also say the same for Demeo as players on Pico can now play cross-platform with players on the other platforms in the west.

Rereleasing and Retesting

Having different needs for different markets doesn’t only offer a challenge, it also offers the greatest blessing that releasing the game on a new platform can offer apart from reaching a new audience: extra QA (quality assurance) testing. 

Whenever you create something, you are bound to make some mistakes along the way, and the tricky part about mistakes in something as complex as video games is finding them all. At Resolution Games, developers test their own games. This is great because we get multiple eyes on the game, testing it with different perspectives, priorities, and goals. But what’s even better than a dedicated QA team helping with testing is multiple QA teams of different backgrounds and priorities doing so.

Every time you release a game for a new platform it needs to be approved by the platform owner before it goes live, and this usually means that a separate QA team specialized in that specific platform will test the game. Naturally, these teams will come across issues specific to the platform at hand, but more importantly they will sometimes also find issues that might be in the live version of the game on other platforms, and fixing them will therefore benefit multiple, if not all, platforms.

A real-world example of this is that we, when bringing both Ultimechs and Blaston to Pico, had reports of localization issues submitted, such as translation or formatting issues. That’s not too surprising though for a QA team that not only plays the game in a non-English language as a part of a task on their checklist but because it’s the norm for them. What’s great about finding localization issues like these is that they generally apply to most non-English localizations, meaning that when we get the issues fixed - as with Ultimechs and Blaston - we make the game better for all localized versions of the game in the process.

Facing Reality

What should be immediately obvious, however, is that all our games aren’t available on all platforms. No matter how passionate you are about letting everyone have access to your game regardless of what headset they own or where they live, and no matter how profitable bringing your game to a new platform or market could be, game development requires both time and manpower. This is also the case when bringing games to new platforms and regions. 

You can be sure, though, that both the Resolution Tech team in Linköping and the teams in Stockholm (apart from developing the games of the future and updating the ones we have already released) are hard at work bringing our games to new audiences of all kinds.

If you would like to join us in this endeavor, you can apply for a position at either our Stockholm or Linköping office. We would love to get new colleagues passionate about multi-platform support and about bringing all kinds of players the best versions of our games that we can offer them.

And if you are a player on a platform that we have recently brought one of our games to, I hope you enjoy it!