The Bits with Joe & Nick — Episode 11: Rolling Deep Hot Seat

And kind of out of nowhere, you decided that you were going to go with a table for one line of games.

You're like, we're not just going to try a solo game.

We're doing a whole line.

We're going to do all these solo games.

And I do know you to tend to like, In some ways, like jump in with both feet and in maybe other words, like overdo it.

Yeah.

Where you're like, we're all in on this idea.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's like to great success, like the mythos line, right? Yeah.

No comment on other times that it might not have worked out so great.

Yeah.

but uh like like you just jumped in to solo why specifically did bite wing find like a desire to when all of your games up to this point i would actually say are like extremely interactive i would say that bite wing tends to publish games that are very interactive by nature Why would you decide to jump into a completely different genre of games, solo games specifically, at the time that you did? Tell me what led you to making that decision.

That's a really good question because I think the standard or common belief or practice is like, hey, build an audience for a specific thing and cater to them.

If you're leader games, you're doing asymmetric emerging narrative heavy, complex, wacky games, right? And you going out and putting out, you know, a Cascadia style take and make just makes absolutely no sense for your audience, right? But there are publishers who take the opposite approach of like, hey, we're going to have different sub brands or different sub categories and try to cater to different audiences under our larger publisher umbrella.

I think there's no... not necessarily one right way to do it, but you're right.

Like we tend to, and we've spent years building this audience of like highly interactive games.

So solo gaming is just so far outside of our, our norm.

But a lot of it comes down to when you, when you encounter a project or an opportunity that is just so good that you can't turn it down, the question doesn't become, you know, does this fit in our line? The question becomes, can we adapt to, to make this a part of our product line.

Admittedly, we committed to this before we encountered Bellatro the Dice Game, before we encountered Rolling Deep.

This was something that Reiner came and pitched to us, his 4-1 series, which I had already played and really liked.

I think it just came down to that Hey, I'm not a huge solo gamer, but I really like this style of solo game that Ragnar's doing, and I really like Bellatro.

So you bring me Bellatro the dice game that's done really well, and I'm very tempted right off from the get-go.

But I think it also comes down to the publishers who are succeeding and thriving and growing over the course of many years are the ones who don't settle.

If you just settle for the status quo, like if Bytewing... just puts out another tiling game on a shared board, which you know that we love to do.