Earlier this year, Thunderful sold Headup for €500,000, three years after acquiring the Germany-based developer and publisher.
While the sale of Headup was part of Thunderful's restructuring program announced in January, founder and CEO Dieter Schoeller says Gaming Industry.biz The decision was also due to a change in the company's priorities.
“Thunderful went in a different direction over the years and created another publishing arm in the UK,” he says when we meet at Devcom in Cologne. “So we ended up having a two-label strategy, me on the independent side and the main business on the UK side for the bigger productions,” he says.
During this time, there was a constant turnover in Thunderful's leadership and “a lot of strategy changes in between.” Schoeller also changed positions quite a bit, moving from vice president of publishing to vice president of production, which led him to dabble in a lot of prototypes “that got pretty wacky,” he says with a laugh.
“I think Headup might have been a little too quirky for a growing corporation trying to streamline its operations.”
Talks for Headup to leave Thunderful lasted about seven months, and Schoeller says they parted on good terms.
“I still own about 1% of Thunderful and I'm very good friends with the whole team, so we didn't part on bad terms; they just had to focus on their strategy,” he explains. “There were a few options: close, find another buyer or sell it back to me. I think I made a decent offer.”
As for what the situation looks like without Thunderful's resources, Schoeller says Headup isn't struggling. In fact, it spun off its Goon Squad development studio earlier this week and has several projects in the works, including racing game Screw Drivers, which is currently in early access.
“It's a different scale. We sold Headup about a decade after we founded it. The reason I sold it wasn't because we weren't profitable or anything – it was a seller's market, so the prices were good.”
For Schoeller, it was important to focus on the needs of his team and what he could offer them to thrive.
“I thought my team would get bored of independent budgets,” he explains. “I was afraid that quality people would leave, so I thought this would be the right next step for the team to really be able to work with bigger budgets and showcase their talent while working on bigger productions. However, we found that, in the end, it's not necessarily more fun.”
“Actually, working with a small title and a small team can be a lot more fun than with a big team, where you have to maintain a big production chain because things get a little bit more relaxed if you go with something independent.”
Schoeller added: “It's nicer to work with passionate people at the grassroots level because there's still a lot of love for the medium and not much of a business model behind it. We try to bring them the knowledge of commercialization and help them find their way, but with a focus on putting passionate developers at the center.”
“And I don't want Headup to be the centre of attention. I'd rather have a studio and the title that its team creates in the foreground, let it stay in the background and just enjoy being able to show its work to the public.”