Raising close to $1m for 'Dead Cells' to turn the video game into a board game

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George: Hi there. My name is George and I help creators run successful campaigns with my company’s YG crowdfunding and fantastic funding. On this podcast, you’ll hear from the creators themselves how they successfully launched their products, games, and businesses using crowdfunding, so you can do the same.

George: Our guest today is Matthew Lego, the creator of Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game and it has raised over $700,000 from over 7,000 backers with six days to go on the campaign. As of this recording, Matthew is the gaming handyman at Scorpion Masqué the Canadian publisher behind this game and many more.

George: Welcome, matthew, we’re super excited to have you.

Matthew: Hi. Thanks very much for having me on. It’s cool to be here.

George: Absolutely. Before we dive into the campaign and the game, what does a gaming handyman do at a company?

Matthew: As you can imagine, a lot of things, although I’m doing a little bit less than I used to when I first gave myself that title, because I started with Scorpio [00:01:00] Masqué about four years ago, and they needed me on board to help primarily with translation and reaching an English language audience because Scorpio Masqué is a Montreal based board game publisher who primarily creates their games and, produces them, publishes them, et cetera, in French and Or I should say created because as soon as I got on board, they started making games in English a lot more. They’d already started doing that, but they needed a little bit of extra help with translation, moving the company into the English language market.

Matthew: And that’s what I was helping out with a lot there. I translated the games. I was a sort of liaison with a lot of the reviewers and that kind of thing, so I had a bit of a marketing hat. I ran play tests. I did a lot of play test coordination and stuff, so I did a whole pile of things.

Matthew: I do mostly translation and adaptation now so sometimes it’s an easier job if it’s just a question of translating rules [00:02:00] and components.

Matthew: And sometimes it’s a tougher job. When I’m working on a trivia game with over 5,000 questions, I have to make sure that it’s for an English language audience.

George: So that sounds like the dream job a lot of things and elements and things pass through your hands. That sounds like a very fun job.

George: I, I completely understand why you have flags behind you because it does seem like a party every day to, to go. That’s right.

George: So let’s talk about this specific game. Dead Cells the board game version of the super popular video game. What can folks expect from the board game version?

Matthew: They can expect a different kind of experience in a familiar setting.

Matthew: I think is the best way of putting it. We didn’t want to make a board game that was exactly like the video game. There have been attempts at that in the past that I won’t necessarily [00:03:00] name. I don’t wanna point fingers, but I’m sure anybody who’s played board, game versions and video games will probably have a few in mind already.

Matthew: We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to make something that was a proper board game within the universe of Dead Cells with recognizable elements, with adapted mechanisms that would make people. Give people the same kind of feeling to give people the same kind of taste that they got from the video game but in board game format, because the video game is fast.

Matthew: Like it’s a fast-paced game. There’s a lot of action, a lot of fighting, a lot of jumping and killing and getting killed and exploding, and you can’t really do that in a board game. But you can still create a dynamic system and a dynamic combat system as well that that is just as satisfying in a slightly different way.

Matthew: And we were really lucky to have the design team on board to help us out, which was the team that called themselves Kodama[00:04:00]

George: and Kodama are they sort of part of the original design team from the video game or they’re new to this project as well.

Matthew: No, they came on board with us when we had the idea of making the game because, The way the board game publishing world works for those people who may not know board game publishers, we don’t generally make our own games, right?

Matthew: We’re not like a video game company where you have in-house designers that create video games. We don’t do that. The way we do it is a lot more like book publishing where we have Game designers who will make a game at home test it with their friends, and then come and present it to us and ask us if we would like to publish it.

Matthew: And then we do tweaking, we do development to, to bring the the important things to the front. And then we put it on the market and the and the designer gets a a royalty check from from the game. But The way that we did this game is that we just had it in our minds that we wanted to make this game.

Matthew: Manuel Sanchez, who’s our head of studio [00:05:00] has had this dream for years. He loves the video game, and he was convinced when I started at the company four years ago, he was already going on about this. It’s gotta work. It’s, there’s gotta be a way to do this. And he focused on it and he made it come true and he got in touch.

Matthew: With like I said, this group of designers and said, let’s make this game. Why don’t you guys design it and we’ll publish it? And we know we’ll work as a development team together.

Matthew: So the Kodama team is Antoine Bauza who’s famous for making the board game Seven Wonders who made a very, Popular game called Draftosaurus.

Matthew: Ludovic Maublanc who made Cyclades and Théo Rivière who made a game called The Loop. But they’ve made tons of games. Like I, I’ve just given their sort of top games, but they’ve made tons, they’re extremely experienced and they’ve done an incredible job designing this game and really doing, like I said, at the top, their own adaptation of the game, not just a cut and paste.

George: So one of the things that whenever you adapt [00:06:00] something popular, whether it’s from the book to the movie or from the movie to the comic or in this game, from the video game to the board game, it can go one of two ways.

George: People can absolutely love it or people can really hate it and be upset. Now clearly with $700,000 raised people are not upset. People absolutely love it. But how did you as a team handle engaging the existing fans and making sure that it stayed true to what they love about the video game?

Matthew: Honestly the thing that we had in our favor is that we are them. We are those fans. Yeah. Manuel Sanchez, like I said, has played the game. I don’t even know how many times, but he’s finished it this way and he’s finished it that way and he’s gone back to it and he knows it inside out.

Matthew: Same with the designers, right? So we’re not just picking up a game that we think is popular and trying to. Trying to churn something out to turn a buck. [00:07:00] We are real fans of the game. I’m terrible at it. Personally, I’m terrible at the video game, right? I just I die that I get dejected and I switch it off.

Matthew: Then I sulk and then I come back to it and I try it again. And yeah, it’s I’m not terribly good at it, but I love it. I love the lore behind it. I love the love, the feel Basically, the way that we are able to handle people who may have problems with the game or who may be unsatisfied with the game is that we answer those questions ourselves as we’re doing the development on the game and as the designers are designing the game, will often say, I don’t know, that’s not really in the spirit of the thing.

Matthew: Or that’s not exactly, that doesn’t sound dead cells to me.

George: Yeah and probably, I guess also just two fans bickering over something is a lot better than just some random publisher who bought rights bickering over something that people love.

George: Probably from one fan to another, it’s, yeah, you’ll accept that more if someone says, Nope, this is not, in the spirit of a game like you say. Yeah, that, exactly. That makes a ton of sense. [00:08:00] Yeah. Are you better at the board game though, if you’re not so good at the video game?

Matthew: Yes. Yes, definitely.

Matthew: I have to say that, don’t I? No, the thing that’s really cool about the board game is that. It’s a cooperative game, right? Because the dead cells video game is a one player game, right? It’s not a team game, you’re playing against the against the island and all the rest.

Matthew: And the way the board game works is that you are working together as a team, right? Yeah, there’s also a solo mode to the game that we’ve that we’ve developed where you get you’re accompanied by Serenade the flying sword, the sentient flying sword, and yeah. There is a solo version of the game, but I love the dynamic of playing as a group.

Matthew: And it’s just one of those things. It’s about, Trying to discuss your strategy before you go into combat, coming up with some ideas, making good choices and that kind of thing. And [00:09:00] at the end of the day, you’re gonna die,

George: and that’s true within this game and outside of the game.

George: So

Matthew: it, it’s bigger picture thing. Yes. We are actually gonna die. It’s a game

George: mechanic. You don’t have to explain to anyone. Everyone is very well aware of how that works. But I think it’s interesting because, I guess maybe what is then part of the success is the fact that it’s normally a video game.

George: You play that by yourself, even if there’s multiplayer game modes you play it by yourself and now you’re offering a totally new experience, a group experience around a property that people love. And so would you maybe see that is, is part of the why this is so successful is that you’re just, you’re offering a different way of engaging with something that people love

Matthew: a hundred percent. And that’s the strength of board games. Like the basic strength of board games is sitting around a table and looking at other people in the face and enjoying [00:10:00] something together. Doing a shared, engaging in a shared experience, whether it’s against each other or working together against the game.

Matthew: It’s that makes board games. So special and so important, and especially in a post covid world where we we got the taste of what it’s like to be alone. I think that board games really have have taken off as a result of that because people do wanna spend that time together.

Matthew: And and it does make a very good dynamic. And there’s a cool thing about the the game as well, because often Cooperative games suffer from what’s called the the Alpha Player Syndrome, where you sit down to play a cooperative game and one guy goes okay, here’s what we’re gonna do.

Matthew: That’s our producer Fran oh, really? Oh.

Matthew: Our game works around that because you’re not supposed to have long debates and discussions and that kind of thing. Everybody makes their own[00:11:00] decisions for, a wide variety of things. The first player token changes around on a regular basis Whatever the first player decides goes.

Matthew: So if the, yeah, if the sort of alpha player is trying to push their agenda, the first player can say, okay, thanks for your input. I think we’re gonna do this instead. And that’s completely part of the game. And it’s, and that’s just the way it goes. And I think that’s a very cool aspect of the game where they’re all playing around the table together.

Matthew: There is limited communication during the combat because you’re not supposed to plan the whole thing out. You’ve just got attacked by zombies or disgusting worms and you don’t wanna be standing like, okay, so what should we have? We’re trying to recreate the video game feeling of okay, we’re under attack.

Matthew: We should probably take care of this guy and that guy afterwards. 1, 2, 3, go.

George: So you basically have, as a player, you have the autonomy of a video game, but the company of a board game is

Matthew: That’s right.

George: A good summary.

Matthew: Oh, absolutely. And like I [00:12:00] said,

George: such clever design.

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. And if you don’t have a a group of of gamers to play with, the solo version is also lots of fun and it has just as much of a dynamic nature as the as the the full game.

George: Okay, so do you have a sense with this specific Kickstarter campaign, what percentage of people are the video game players and what percentage of people are just board game players who are just interested in this game?

George: Do you have a feel for that number?

Matthew: Yeah. It’s hard to say, right? I personally don’t have a lot of feedback on that myself. I know that when Motion twin, the creators of Dead Cells, when Motion Twin announced that we were doing the video game interest went through the roof on Kickstarter we were, I can’t remember how many we had, but after motion twin mentioned that the board game was coming out on Kickstarter, I think we ended up with some, something crazy, like 18,000 subscribers. [00:13:00] To the to the Kickstarter campaign before it even started. We don’t have 18,000 backers at the moment but but we’re doing but we’re doing pretty well.

Matthew: But there’s definitely interest there. And yeah, I couldn’t tell you that’s something that we’re gonna have to deck out afterwards. I think,

George: Maybe this is top secret stuff, but within these licensed constructions, does the Licenseor get a cut per game sold, or do you pay like a one-off license?

George: For the entire project?

Matthew: To be completely honest with you, I don’t know. I’m not I’m not privy to that information. If memory serves, I think in general you pay a flat fee for a license and I don’t know how much, I don’t know if there are any kind of royalties that associated, but yeah, so I’m not sure about that one.

George: So then you’re really lucky to have a license or a property to promote you. And I know you, you may not have been completely involved in all the sort of details of marketing the Kickstarter [00:14:00] campaign, but how did you go about leveraging that community. If there’s anything you can speak to that, were you just like hoping they would just talk about it and it just blew up?

George: Or did you have a coordinated plan to release this news to the community together?

Matthew: There was a coordinated plan. I know that for sure. Our brand manager Joel Bunick worked. And is still working like like a crazy person on the campaign it was set up extremely well and over a long period of time we had to create a number of physical prototypes that were made in our factories our factories our partner factories in China.

Matthew: And then shipped to reviewers beforehand so that they could play the game and put out their reviews for the Kickstarter campaign. So already that started to create a little bit of buzz and just the fact that when we started posting on it, Posting about it on our social media sites, people started getting really excited [00:15:00] because it’s very different from what we normally make at Scorpio Masqué.

Matthew: At Scorpio Masqué we mostly specialize in family games party games and children’s games. So those are our specialties.

George: And so the other thing I noticed in what seems to be a departure or a novelty is this is the first Kickstarter project you guys have done, right?

Matthew: That’s right.

George: Why after 40 titles a as a publisher, have you now decided to do Kickstarter?

Matthew: It’s way outside of our normal business model. We don’t make. Super huge nerdy games. That’s not our, that’s not our thing.

George: Okay, so you do something that’s already outside your business model, then you think, you know what?

George: We’re gonna do everything outside our business model. We’re also gonna like your distribution completely outside of our business model. What if you have been privy to that information? What is the thought process within an organization to then think, let’s do the hard thing and just. Go all out.

Matthew: I don’t think that [00:16:00] we could have generated as much interest in this type of game from our community. Yeah. Like I said, we make family games, we make children’s games. We make party games. So a big game based on a video game that is a much more complex animal.

Matthew: I don’t know how much we would’ve been able to leverage within our own network, but I know that doing a Kickstarter, All we would need to do is generate enough interest to produce the minimum number of games for a print run. And because we didn’t know, we didn’t know how many people would be interested in a game like this.

Matthew: We were pretty sure that it was going to be popular. We were pretty sure that. We put all of the right things in place with all of the illustrations, with all of, with the design team that we took on board and everything, we were pretty sure that we were gonna do a good job. But it’s hard to say how much people are really gonna get on board.

Matthew: And with Kickstarter, one of the [00:17:00] things with that is that you’re able to provide as many games as there is demand in a normal business model. If we were to, if we were to print, 10,000 games and there’s only 4,000 people interested in it. Then we’re sitting on 6,000 games that we can’t sell.

Matthew: So that’s the strength of Kickstarter.

George: That makes total sense. If your existing distribution channels would not really help you anyways with this project, then yeah, why not just trust something totally new.

Matthew: Also another aspect was that we wanted to make this a beautiful product, right? Because we’re such fans of the game, we wanted to go all in. And, the traditional market. I don’t know how many games we would sell at that price in a normal retail store just being released like that. But we know that if we go on Kickstarter, we can offer the retail version or the standard edition and also offer the collector’s edition where people [00:18:00] can really jump in and appreciate it and get as much as they can from what we want to give to the product.

George: And do more people back, like the deluxe collector’s edition than they do with the normal one?

Matthew: Yep. I don’t know what the ratio is, but it’s a significant number of people who are doing the collectors edition pledge.

George: That is such a good thing about crowdfunding in general.

George: I think the fact that if you were to get people over that hurdle to back a crowdfunding campaign with the associated risk, they’re definitely all in. They’re definitely fans and they can definitely, upsell a premium. Versus, because I think some people sometimes think crowdfunding is more about the deal and the discount and things like that, whereas I think like you, I think it’s more about actually not the best deal.

George: It’s about the best product and sort of the most special product to that community. So

Matthew: getting more bang for your buck.

George: Exactly. Did you, Run any ads for this project because it’s so big? Or did you just completely rely on the existing community?

Matthew: I’m not sure [00:19:00] exactly what we did ad wise.

Matthew: I do know that. We ran a banner ad on board Game Geek, the big board gaming website. And for other paid ads. I’m not, I don’t exactly know what we did. I don’t, off the top of my head, I don’t remember hearing. People talking about go and check this ad out here and there, but that, that may have gone on in the background and I wasn’t aware of it.

Matthew: But yeah, yeah, board Game Geek I know is where we did we did some publicity.

George: Probably then it doesn’t sound like there was a really big ad campaign pushing this. If you didn’t hear about that so was this the first crowdfunding project for you that you were ever involved in?

Matthew: Me personally. Yes. Yeah.

George: And what are some of the biggest surprises, takeaways that you personally noticed as you went through your first coffee project?

Matthew: The biggest one was just the crunch coming up to the launch. We [00:20:00] knew that it was gonna get busy and we knew that we had a lot to do.

Matthew: We’re not newbies, we’re experienced publishers. So we had a good plan, we had a good schedule going in, but things really did start to get very tight towards the end about getting rules written and stuff. And because the game is still under development, right?

Matthew: Not in a significant way. There’s not any massive changes to mechanisms in the game that are gonna take place. But there’s still tweaks and still changes here and there. And I wrote, I was in charge of writing all the rules for the game, and that kept getting tweaked right down to 11:59.

Matthew: And I had to I had to keep making changes to the rules and we had to keep moving things around and stuff to make sure that we were giving the backers the best vision of the game possible and the most up to date view of the game. So that sort of crunch time was was surprising to me.

Matthew: And we’re in the second week of the [00:21:00] campaign. And it’s, yeah, it’s constant work. It’s constant stuff. It’s not surprised me, I have to say that I know a lot of people in the industry. I know a lot of board game publishers and a lot of publishers who do crowdfunding campaigns and I’ve heard the stories, I’ve heard people talk about it.

Matthew: I’ve seen people at the end of these campaigns some of them go on for a month and I don’t know how they manage it. And so I knew what I was getting into. But because I was like I’m just a translator guy. I’m just like, but the whole thing is done in English. As a matter of fact for dead cells, everything has being done mostly in English.

Matthew: The designers did a lot of work in French. But, all of the rules, writing all of the posts and stuff like that are generated primarily in English by me. Yeah. So I’ve had a lot on my plate with regular Social media posts updates, news reveals, all of those sorts of things.

Matthew: And they need to be constantly generated and constantly created. We’re very lucky because we’re partnered with la boite de [00:22:00] jeu which is a French publisher as well. They put out a game not too long ago. Called Tribes of the Wind which has done very well. And they’re really experienced with crowdfunding campaigns.

Matthew: And they’ve helped us, they helped us put the page together. And we have two members of their team working as our community managers dealing with Q&A and any kinds of issues that that arise during the crowdfunding campaign. So I haven’t even seen any of that, but I’m sure that’s all going at a hundred miles an hour.

George: I think the conclusion of that is it takes a village to run these big campaigns.

Matthew: 100%. Yeah. Everybody’s pulled together. Everybody is got on board and yeah. It’s a question of everyone just to throw yet another metaphor in there to batten down the hatches and, get through it and make sure it make sure we’re we’re giving giving the best we can.

George: You’ve already revealed a bunch of stuff. Is there anything that we haven’t heard before, the fans haven’t heard before that you can reveal about the game?

Matthew: Yeah, there’s one thing I can [00:23:00] tell you. It’s a little bit a little bit enigmatic. But yeah, we’ve already revealed a bunch of stuff, hidden characters that you’re gonna have to try to unlock and find some nice graphic elements like UV spots on the player boards and on the bio boards and stuff to really add Add a nice visual touch to the game.

Matthew: And the one thing that I can tell you is that there’s something coming up, there’s a reveal coming up that is not in the video game. There’s something, yeah, something coming that is not in the video game but has been accepted and green lighted by by motion twin.

George: That is very exciting. Keep their eyes peeled. I think with that we should go into the shout out so people can go to Kickstarter. They can look up Dead Cells, the Rogue Light Board Game. It will be linked into show notes as well.

George: Any other places we should send people social media accounts or just go straight to Kickstarter and back that game.

Matthew: No, for sure. They can they can always visit the Scorpio Masqué[00:24:00] social media sites. We’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter, we’re on Instagram. If you visit us there, there’s gonna be regular posts on there.

Matthew: Also, if you look at motion twin has information on that as well. If you play the game, if you play the video game on Steam or wherever else the video game has an ad with the Kickstarter information on it, so you can you can check that out too.

George: Amazing. Matthew, thank you so much for your time and your candid answers. We. Might have to leave the party in that you do suck at the video game. I’m very sorry that ha that has been revealed as well. But we really appreciate your honesty and your time talking to us today. Thank you so much.

Matthew: No, it’s my pleasure. Thank you very much. Okay,