Interviews// Indy Spotlight: Hogrocket - Part 1

'Lifestyle' is a word that keeps popping up. On that score, I ask how the hours at Hogrocket are compared to AAA development and whether iOS development comes with a Crunch. “I think when you're running you're own business, it's permanent crunch!” Pete says.

“It's all self-imposed though, so it's kind of better,” Ben adds.

It's a qualitative difference, according to Pete. “It's a shift. It goes from being an external pressure on you because other people are reliant on you to deliver and make sure the game's shipped and everything like that. But, with Hogrocket and running your own business the pressure's internal because all the pressure you have you put on yourself.

“It all feels more on the edge. We want to be living closer to the edge in terms of pushing yourself and the challenge of it. We've got to balance an awful lot of things as a small business. We've got to be designers, we've got to be artists, we've got to be contractors, we've got to be business people we've got to be marketing experts. We've got to be everything. It's kind of nice though that we're pushing ourselves in all different areas.”

So, has being ex-Bizarre staff given them a head start in terms of publicity? “Definitely,” says Ben, “and we knew that was an option available to us and we made that part of our strategy. That's why we've built the Hogrocket brand, that's why we decided to not talk about the game until launch, because we knew that we could rely on a certain amount of coverage as soon as we put the game out. Whereas, if we didn't have those contacts our strategy would have been completely different.

“We've spent a long time building our company profile in the minds of press - and key community people, because they're kind of crossing over a bit now, I think. There are journalists and then there are popular bloggers and they kind of serve the same function from our point of view, so we're just trying to talk to everyone.”

Still, keeping completely quiet about what they've been working on flies in the face of conventional marketing wisdom. “Our thinking on it - and we're still waiting to see if it was a good strategy or not, really - was that it's a very impulsive market these days on the 'net,” Pete notes.

“People read something or see something and if it's not available right at that moment then they might click through to it and go 'oh, it's not available on the app store'. Then, next time they see it it has less value because there's a million other things competing.”

Ben, who as well as being a developer was a community manager at Bizarre, has a little history with these things, adds, “I think the way AAA (publishers) do things the way they do is because they're at retail, and it costs money to be at retail where you have that very short window.

"Basically, if your awareness is on a graph you want it to be peaking where you've got that window, then it can drop off as much as you want. It doesn't matter, cos that's when you make those sales in those two weeks.

“But ours is completely different. We can have zero awareness in those two weeks, we can have a launch and have some awareness and hopefully sustain it over time, because it doesn't cost us money.”

“It has the long tail on the digital storefront,” says Pete. Launch isn't as important. It's still important in terms of chart position - you want to make the most of it purely for chart position on the app store. And mindshare and building critical mass. It's not all push marketing I guess. It builds some self-sustaining word of mouth.”

That concludes the first part of our Hogrocket Interview - stayed tuned for more soon.