This is the interview text from the article: "CEO of Cyanide: "2008 was a transition year"". Some information from this interview was not used in the article, so by reading this you'll get the 'entirity'.
1. First of all, please introduce yourself.
I'm Patrick Pligersdorffer, aka Storm, CEO and one of the founders of Cyanide.
2. 2009 has just started, so I guess it's time to evaluate on 2008 - from Cyanide's perspective, how was the year, both financially and from an ambition point of view?
2008 was a transition year for us. We didn't release as many titles as some previous year as we pushed back a couple titles and started investing in other projects. We still did OK. Pro Cycling Manager continues to do well. We were pleasantly surprised by the good numbers of the PSP version. I was a bit disappointed that Microsoft did not seem interested in allowing us to do an Xbox 360 version (apparently cycling is not a popular according to them).
3. And as said, we're in 2009 now - what's Cyanide's plans for this year? What can we expect? What's your ambitions?
We have a big slate of releases for the first semester. Obviously, we'll be launching our first free-to-play game with Dungeon party. We hope that the game will be successful. It's really fun to play and for us that's a totally different type of game. Then, we'll be releasing Blood Bowl on a variety of platforms. Then, we'll have PCM 2009 and another title that I cannot really discuss at the moment but that would hopefully be appealing to the community of PCM daily.
We've started working on the pre-production of an RPG and hopefully, this will find a publisher.
4. What I do know is that you've Blood Bowl coming up. Personally, I see this as a new major hit for Cyanide, one which may be able to "top" Pro Cycling Manager. What's your take on this?
The potential for Blood Bowl is probably bigger than PCM. The fact that cycling is not a mainstream sport in a number of big countries limits its potential (but we will always remain committed to it!). It's a solid licence. It's a fun game to play (personnally I prefer the turn-based version). We'll see what happens with it but we hope it will do very well.
5. You're also releasing your very first free game, Dungeon Party. How's Cyanide able to survive when you use ressources on free games?
We always use our ressources when we start new games, whether they are free or not. We start to pay back some of our expenses when games are released. Dungeon Party is a bit trickier since we have little idea if we'll be able to pay back our development costs with the optional elements that won't be free. But that's a risk we are willing to take. Additionnally, as for all games, we try to share the financial risks with other partners. We have a cushion and we just took a little from it in the same way that we're financing the R&D for the next engine of PCM.
6. Speaking of ressources, the world's currently in a financial crisis. How does this affect Cyanide? After all, it's a small company.
We don't take loans. We wouldn't get any anyway. So we're not very affected. Our partners are rather solid so they continue to pay us on time. We haven't released any games since the start of the economic crisis so we haven't been able to see any impact on the sales of our titles. There will certainly be an impact but hopefully it will be limited and we should be able to weather the storm. We're still in an investing for the future mode so we're not very worried for now.
7. Are you planning to make a follow-up to your Pro Rugby Manager games? Other than the ones already announced, will Cyanide release new games?
There won't be an official sequel of the rugby game unfortunately. It's very hard to find a publishing partner for this type of game unfortunately but we're trying to work this sport with a different angle in the near future.
Besides the games I mentioned previously, we'll be releasing another DS game in the Dungeon Party universe called Dungeon Raiders. We also have a DS title in talks with a major publisher but I don't know if it will be ready for this year.
8. This summer, you're releasing the 9th version of Pro Cycling Manager. Will this be going on for 9 more years?
Hopefully yes :-)
We were happily suprised with the success of the track cycling mode so we'll try to add to this part while continuing to evolve the traditional road cycling modes.
9. In terms of funding, is there any plans to use more money on the Pro Cycling Manager serial?
For the first time, we have two teams working on the game at the same time. There's one working on this year's edition while another one has already started to work on the engine of the 2010 version.
10. Although this is an interview about Cyanide in general, it's still an interview made by a PCM fan site -- so, is there anything you'd like to say about the upcoming game?
Is there anything you can reveal at this point?
I think I've told all I can say at that point on PCM 2009 and 2010. I'll just add that we will be relasing another cycling game this year besides PCM 2009. :-)
(The article based on this interview can be found here.) |
