Rockfish: former Fishlabs CEO confirms new team is making next-gen titles, reveal expected "around gamescom"
Rockfish is the new studio from former Fishlabs CEO Michael Schade. It follows Fishlabs going bankrupt in October before its entire payroll was snapped up by Koch Media. Founders Schade and Christian Lohr are going next-gen with their new team, which has been discussed in a new interview.
Speaking with GI.biz, Schade said that Rockfish is, "completely platform agnostic" and is sticking with, "high-end, 3D action games." He confirmed that the team hopes to announce its first project, "around gamescom."
On the teams shift from free-to-play mobile titles to next-gen formats, Schade continued, "A lot of people are wondering why we're looking into console and next-gen, even though our pedigree and our experience for more than ten years is on mobile. The reason is that it's really hard on mobile, and we experienced this ourselves, the paid market is almost non-existent on the App Store anymore.
"On Android it has never existed. So you have to go free-to-play and it is expensive. The free-to-play business on mobile is now just for the big guys that have deep pockets and/or billions of active users a month so they can cross promote their own titles.
"We'd been very successful when paid was still a business model that worked, but now everything has gone free-to-play and although we understand how the mechanics work, and we tried and had some respectable results there...it's a very very tough business.
Schade added that new platforms are exciting due to the way they disrupt the market, and the opportunity to rethink the team's entire strategy excites the CEO.
When asked if Rockfish will take the crowd-funded route, Schade replied, "We've talked with various partners already so we might get project funding, again I can't say too much about that. But at this point in time we're not looking for investors, but maybe at the later stage?"
It seems the weheels are firmly in motion over at Rockfish. Are you interested to see how the free-to-play mobile studio takes to next-gen development? Let us know below.