Evil Empire tells us how it’s grown from a Dead Cells support studio into a champion for indie games through the Triple-i Initiative.
Evil Empire began life carved out from Dead Cells developer Motion Twin as a standalone studio that would carry on supporting it while the rest of the team moved onto its next project, Windblown. Fast forward to today, and it's blossomed into a multi-game studio, most recently bringing us Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, while also supporting the indie game scene through its Triple-i Initiative. I caught up with CEO Thomas Pfeiffer and Head of Business Ben Laulan to learn about making that journey, and what advice they'd pass on to other budding indie teams.
Laulan says the team's success with Dead Cells grew from its four co-founders into 15 working full-time on the roguelike, before it began to rapidly scale up to its modern size of 50 permanent contractors to take on projects with bigger publishers. We first got The Rogue Prince of Persia in conjunction with Ubisoft, and just this week Evil Empire has released Castlevania: Belmont's Curse from its partnership with Konami. There's already more in the works, although nothing to be said on that front yet.
"Right now we have multiple lines," Pfeiffer remarks. "You can imagine us working on two or three games in parallel at different stages." The team also has its business unit for live ops, which has seen it supporting other studios' with projects such as arena-shooter roguelike Brotato from Blobfish Games, and its marketing team. As part of this work, it created the Triple-i Initiative, a recurring indie showcase that first took place in 2024 and just held its fourth incarnation in early October, the second installment of this year.
"The last event in April was extremely successful, because we made something like three million wishlists in just a week of events across all participating games," Laulan tells me. That estimated out to an average of around 65,000 wishlists per game, but with quite a few reaching six figures.
The team was still waiting for the dust to settle on its October showcase when I spoke to them. "There are chances it's going to be a bit less," Laulan notes, "But we do believe we managed to still create an impactful event for the participating studios." In part, he says this was affected by Steam visibility - while this latest Triple-i showcase had specific sales on all three major consoles for the first time, Valve's platform has a "one featuring per year per event" that had already been used with the April showing.
Among the heavy hitters this time were the likes of Croteam's The Talos Principle 3, a crossover between Subnautica 2 and Dave the Diver, and the reveal of Aftergods from Tribes of Midgard developer Norsfell. One that Laulan was particularly pleased by the response to was Machinarium 2, from adventure game veterans Amanita Design, which continues the tale of robot partners Josef and Berta almost 20 years on.
"It's a game I grew up with, I loved it," he recalls of the 2009 original, "and I was so happy to get the reveal of a sequel. So I was very eager to see players' feedback to that - is it too old to come back? Will it really make a splash? And it was a huge performer in the showcase, so we are really happy about that."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/indie-games/evil-empire-interview-triple-i-initiative
