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Shreya Dhanasekaran · · 5 min readThe rare SG indie game studio making millions on original IP
“When you buy chicken rice, you want the full plate and everything in it. You wouldn’t want to buy the plate if you had to pay separately for the rice,” Desmond Wong, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based game studio The Gentlebros, tells Tech in Asia.
That’s the analogy he uses to explain why he’s against in-game purchases. Instead, his company targets an audience that wants to access a premium game for a one-time fee.
Desmond Wong, co-founder and CEO of The Gentlebros / Photo credit: The Gentlebros
Any other means of monetization would put this audience off its product, says Wong.
This strategy has worked. Within three years of the release of its first Cat Quest title, the game received over 1.3 million paid downloads worldwide. Gentlebros earned a gross profit of over US$3.8 million from 2017 to 2020 with just three members in its team and is currently profitable, says Wong.
Now the company is focused on expanding the Cat Quest game franchise with a third title in the works. It’s also gunning to scale its team.
Despite working with a small crew, Wong expects the next game to earn US$10 million in lifetime revenue even though it will be similarly priced as its predecessors.
Wong explains that a game’s intellectual property (IP) can succeed if there is a balance between having something fresh and including elements that people like and are used to.
“You don’t want to create something alien and weird because then people can’t understand or appreciate it. It is an uphill battle to fight,” explains Wong.
Taking a big leap
Founded in 2015, Gentlebros is a rare Singapore gaming studio with a game IP that has a loyal following. Its first release, Slashy Hero, was a free-to-play experience.
Having gotten little recognition for the title, the company switched from being a free-to-play game developer to a premium game creator with the launch of Cat Quest.
Image credit: Gentlebros
It was a risky move, as the team wondered if anyone would want to pay for a game the studio developed when they could play other games for free.
A quest beyond cats
Multiplayer support
The cat’s second life
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Singapore-based The Gentlebros earned US$3.8 million in gross profit from the release of two games with no funding. We look at how it did this.
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