Cult of the Lamb has been the darling of the Australian games scene since it dropped back in August. After selling 1 million copies in its first week it went on to sweep four Australian Game Developer Awards (AGDAs), including Game of the Year. But despite the game’s success the small Melbourne studio, Massive Monster, doesn’t want to grow too fast.
In Cult of the Lamb, you play as an alarmingly adorable lamb that is saved from sacrifice by a godlike creature. Possessing you, you become a powerful entity that’s instructed to start your own cult and grow in power. What’s particularly unique about the game isn’t just the intersection between cute artwork and dark humour, but that it combines elements of two different gaming genres — roguelikes and sims.
One moment you may be planting crops and doing cult admin to keep your followers fed and happy, and the next you’re exploring a dungeon to level up your character, weapons and abilities. It was a risky move, but it works.
Cult of the Lamb may seem like an overnight success, but it took years for Massive Monster to get to this point.
“Our origin story is through flash games. We all used to make them together and then the flash game industry started dying and as a result of that, we started Massive Monster,” creative director, Julian Wilton, told SmartCompany at PAX Australia.
“Originally there were three of us in the company making our own weird games. I think we’ve made 50 games between us. We’re like what are we gonna do now that flash games are dead? We started exploring ideas and making console and desktop games. Our first was Adventure Pals, which was a moderate success. Another was called Never Give Up.”
It was only after coming up with the idea for Cult of the Lamb that all three team members worked on the same game simultaneously, or even brought new team members onto the project.
In the indie gaming space, this is a familiar story — small teams working on big ideas, often with little to no funding, particularly for studios outside of Victoria. While the federal government announced its Digital Games Tax Offset earlier this year, it’s only applicable for projects that cost more than $500,000. That isn’t particularly useful to early-stage startup studios. It is also yet to be legislated.
Fortunately for Massive Monster, VicScreen has by far the most robust state-funded grant system in the country. But even then, the team only tapped it for about $40,000 to attract potential publishers.
“My pitch to them was basically, we just want a little bit of funding to polish up this demo. I think like even just as small amount makes a big difference.”
While Cult of the Lamb had interest from several publishers, Massive Monster really wanted to land Devolver Digital. Based in Austin, Texas, it specialises in indie games.
“We knew going in that we could push the style and make it looks kind of fucked up because Devolver likes this style of games — a lot of personality and a kind of punk aesthetic,” Wilton said.
“They do whatever they want, even if it’s a bit weird.”
But getting in front of Devolver took a bit of a hustle mindset. The team didn’t have a contact to reach out to, so the company used a bit of guesswork.
“Jay, the design director in the company, basically just guessed the email of someone there,” Wilton said.
“They got back to us and said ‘we like it, let’s sign!’ They were just ready to go, which we like really liked. A few other publishers were wanting to do some due diligence and all that. And that’s fair enough but we didn’t want to mess around with that.”
Having already shipped a couple of titles prior to Cult of the Lamb, Massive Monster had learned some valuable lessons about spend and saving some money for post-release.
“Publishers will often try just get it for the cheapest they can. But Devolve was like, this isn’t enough money and added like $200,000 budget on the $300,000 we asked for,” Wilton said.
“We also learned to bake in some end development to support the game. The last payments when a game comes out might be one month of support and then it’s done. We wanted to have like nine months of support, so we could really look after it.”
Massive Monster also wanted a bit of a buffer in case the game wasn’t a success so it could work on its next project.
“We wanted to be a sustainable company and plan for the worst-case scenario.”
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. But in light of Cult of the Lamb‘s momentous success as not only a game, but an Aussie export, there are questions around business maturity and growth.
After all, the vast majority of indie studios are small and made up of a handful of people. Generally, this can leave a gap when it comes to areas such as business development, hiring and marketing unless they’re given mentorship and support.
“Now that the game has been quite successful, we need to figure out how you grow from that. How do you actually run a company? We’ve just been a scrappy tech startup for so long. Now it’s like, what do we do? How do you hire someone? How do you do an employee contract?”
While it is looking to hire some roles, Massive Monster still wants to keep the team small for now to retain its unique personality and approach to its games.
“We just brought on a community manager so there’s six of us now and we might be hiring a seventh. We’ve always just gotten contractors on so we could be a bit more lean. But now we have the resources to be able to actually hire people.
“We’re going to do it really slow and go from there. “
Disclosure: the author was a host of the Australian Game Developer Awards.
Senior Technology Journalist
A multi-award-winning journalist, Tegan has been reporting on technology, telecommunications and gaming for the past 10 years. She regularly appears on mainstream media channels as an expert tech commentator. Her previous roles include editor of Gizmodo Australia and global reviews editor at Finder. She has also served as a reporter and editor across Business Insider, Lifehacker and Kotaku Australia. Tegan was the co-host of one of the top technology podcasts in Australia, Queens of the Drone Age. You can find her on Twitter @Tegan_Writes.
