Earlier this year, Thunderful sold Headup for €500,000 – three years after acquiring the German developer and publisher.
While the sale of Headup was part of Thunderful's restructuring program announced in January, founder and CEO Dieter Schoeller said GamesIndustry.biz the decision was also influenced by a change in the company's priorities.
“Thunderful has gone in a different direction over the years and built another publishing department in the UK,” he says when we meet at Devcom in Cologne. “So we ended up with a strategy of potentially two labels, me being on the indie side and the main business being more on the UK side for bigger productions,” he says.
During this time, there were constant changes in Thunderful's leadership and “many strategies changed in between”. Schoeller also moved around quite a bit, from VP of publishing to VP of production, which led him to tackle a lot of prototypes “that got pretty unpredictable,” he laughs.
“I think Headup might have been a little too idiosyncratic for a larger, larger company trying to streamline its operations.”
Discussions about Headup leaving Thunderful lasted about seven months, and Schoeller says they parted ways on good terms.
“I still own about 1% of Thunderful and I'm good friends with the whole team, so we didn't part ways on bad terms – they just had to focus on their strategy,” he explains. “There were several options, either close, find another buyer or sell it back to me. I think I made an offer that was acceptable.”
As for what the situation is like without Thunderful's resources, Schoeller says Headup has no problems. In fact, she spun off her development studio Goon Squad earlier this week and has a number of projects planned.
“It's a different scale. We sold Headup about ten years after we started 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 all about focusing on his team's needs and what he can provide for them to thrive.
“I thought maybe my team was getting bored with independent budgets,” he explains. “I was worried that quality people might leave, so I thought this would be the right next step for the team to really get into bigger budgets and show their talent working on bigger productions. Although we found that it is not necessarily more pleasant in the end.
“It can actually be a lot more enjoyable to work on a small title with a small team than a big one where you have to maintain a big production pipeline because the screws are a little looser if you go indie.”
Schoeller added: “It's nicer to work with passionate people on a local level because they still love the medium so much that there's not much of a business model behind it. We try to add knowledge of marketability and help them find their way in, but with a focus on passionate developers took center stage.
“And I don't want Headup to be in the spotlight. I'd rather have the studio and the title its team creates in the foreground, sitting in the background and just enjoying it so they can get their work in front of the public.” audience.”