Why the developer of PlateUp has joined forces with Yogscast Games

Well, this is something you don't see every day.

We're all familiar with publishers investing in or buying developers. But it's rare to see a developer invest in their own publisher. Yet this is exactly what's happening over at Yogscast Games.

Alastair Janse van Rensburg developed the game PlateUp during the COVID lockdowns, and it went on to be a smash hit after its release on Steam in 2022, later being ported to consoles. Video Game Insights estimates the game has generated more than $17.2 million in revenue across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, without including the Switch port, for which figures aren't available.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz in 2024, van Rensburg said his first royalty payment totalled more than £1 million – a handy step up from his £30,000 a year job in Oxford as a cybersecurity researcher.

Now, van Rensburg's company It's Happening is joining with Yogscast Games to form what they're calling an "indie super-group." It's Happening has acquired a 30% stake in Yogscast, and van Rensburg is acting as a consultant for the publisher, helping to spot and mould indie gems.

Simon Byron, managing director of Yogscast Games, acknowledges that the deal is the opposite of what usually happens. "Normally publishers buy developers," he says, noting that it doesn't always work out too well for the developer when a big company scoops them up. "What we wanted was a relationship which was collaborative, and also which brought out the best in both of us."

Byron says that for a long time now, he's been showing potential new game signings to van Rensburg to ask his opinion on them. "And he'd come back with points which were just brilliant, annoyingly so, where he'd go, 'Look, I think that they should be doing this, that, and the other'. So we've had that relationship informally anyway, and it's been brilliant to work towards an arrangement where it becomes formal."

"It's true that we've had a really close relationship the whole time," says van Rensburg. "I think one thing that makes me very excited to work with Yogscast and Simon is how very genuinely developer-focused he is." He adds that he had no idea about publishing or the game industry more generally when he made PlateUp, having come from a background as an academic at the University of Oxford. But he had read warnings in various indie spaces about how publishers could be predatory.

"And I was going through this deal with Simon being like, 'These guys are really nice, everything's going really well. Everyone's so mean about publishers, why are they saying all these things [about them being predatory]?'"

Betting on first-timers

The immediate success of PlateUp took Yogscast by surprise. "We were basing our decisions on selling 100,000 copies over two years," recalls Byron. "And I think I showed my naivety when we sold 201,000 copies in the first month."

Byron thinks this shows how important it is to take a chance on developers making their first game. "Some publishers don't like working with first-time devs, and we really do. I've heard some publishers say that they'll never sign someone's first game. And my view is, if you don't have a first game, how do you get a second game? How do you get a third game? Everybody has to start somewhere."

But it's a challenging, transformative time in the publishing world. "What's clear at the moment is that there is absolutely no shortage of content, and that what used to work doesn't work anymore," muses Byron. Trusted old metrics like wishlist numbers have gone "completely out of the window," he says.

"My biggest beef at the moment is that we don't have any actual data to go on," he continues. "We all scramble around, and we analyse other people's sales data, and we're trying to do stuff from followers and wishlists and stuff like that. We're all fumbling around in the dark."

What has become clear from his conversations with other publishers is that "a good game on its own is not guaranteed to sell, there has to be a lot more about it."

Byron is hoping van Rensburg can help with spotting and shaping games that have the potential to break through. He has already consulted on two new signings: Glory on Pluto, an engine-building roguelite from LittleBigEars Games, and Dupery, a solo deduction roguelike from Gilded Rune Games.

Van Rensburg says it's not necessarily about finding completely unique titles that are pioneering new genres. "Often the people that are going to convert best into being players are people that like that genre and play those games. It's not about it being original in a broad sense, it's about giving something new to me, that twist."

"That's the origin of PlateUp," he continues. "I was playing Overcooked and saying, 'Actually, this doesn't really work for me.'" His feeling was that the game was too frantic and stressful, so although PlateUp still involves cooking and serving food, the twist is that it's more about gradually expanding a café over time.

A difficult market

For publishers and developers alike, the past few years have been tricky. "Last year, we were thinking about what comes next," says Byron. "In the first three years of Yogscast, we were mostly successful with our games. Last year, everybody was talking about 'survive until 25'. I think that the challenges started earlier than that. And certainly we were looking at what we were doing and thinking about how we wanted to grow."

"It's clear that the market is not what it was," he continues. "The irony is we've got more people than ever playing games, more people than ever buying games. The challenge is you've got more people than ever making and publishing games. It's never been easier to do all of those things. And so finding something and helping those games stand out continues to be the challenge.

"Almost every week, a game comes out, you think it's going to do something, you then look at the numbers, and it hasn't quite done that. And then equally, there are games you've never heard of that do very well."

He partly puts this down to a disparity between what publishers think the public wants and what the public actually wants. "We all operate in a bubble, we all play lots of games all the time, and the average consumer doesn't. And so their choices are much starker than ours. They will buy two or three games a year, and so it's a real privilege to be one of those games."

Word of mouth and content creators are the two key channels through which players now find out about games, he says, having long displaced the games press. "If you look at the platforms, they're moving more into being actual social media networks themselves," he adds. And wishlists are not as important as they once were. "We've all realised that they're ineffectual, because they are not genuine. So what do you have to do? You have to create that incentive, and that's through demos and playtests."

"I think NextFest is probably over. Everybody plans everything around those events now"

Playtests were what helped PlateUp to gain momentum, Byron says. "So the challenge for publishers is to help developers get that sort of thing in front of consumers. Back in the old days, you almost used to hide your game from consumers. You'd have an inner circle of the developers, you'd have the press, and then when it was ready, [you would release it with a big fanfare]. Now, it's like, OK, get it out there, get them playing it now, get them involved in it, get them championing it. That community is much more important than some of the old metrics that we used to have."

"The way that we want to bring games to market is through open development, playtests, demos, community, all that sort of stuff. I think NextFest is probably over. Everybody plans everything around those events now. … Everybody's competing for the same space."

Growth through more games

Byron thought that if Yogscast was to meet its ambitions of growing, it would need a partner with a common goal – finding more games with big potential.

"How do you grow a publisher?" he asks. "You grow it through spending more on games and charging more for them, or publishing more games. Both of those are difficult things, but one of them has more risk, because if you have a very expensive game that fails, that can bring down a lot with it. What we want to do is really find our audiences with specific types of games."

For his part, van Rensburg is keen to help on that front. "PlateUp's obviously been a huge success and given us a position where we can choose what we want to do with a relatively free hand," he says. "And what we wanted to do was get involved with more games, [rather than] scaling up a studio in the traditional sense.

"We could have hired ten more programmers, a bunch of artists, and then five years later we have massive budget problems, and the game doesn't do well, and suddenly we have to do layoffs. And we thought actually the better way for us to do that is to explore ways where we can get involved in other people's games, [providing] creative direction, giving advice, and getting to see these games do really well."