How a Singapore indie gaming startup earned $3.8m with its flagship titles

According to a Mordor Intelligence report, Asia Pacific holds the largest market share in the global gaming market. Meanwhile, a report by Newzoo and Gamescom Asia found that Southeast Asia generated US$4.4 billion in game revenues last year, owing mostly to the region’s increasing mobile device usage and the rising popularity of esports.

Image credit: Gentlebros

The booming gaming industry has paved the way for regional giants Sea and Tencent to become two of the most successful gaming companies worldwide.

Garena, the gaming unit of Sea, has found massive success with its self-published title Free Fire, netting the company over US$1 billion in lifetime revenue worldwide as of November last year. It also published the mobile version of Call of Duty, one of the most well-known video game series in history.

Tencent, one of the world’s biggest video game companies, also recently said that its online games revenue during Q2 2020 grew 40% year on year to US$5.5 billion. The boost was mainly driven by the success of its mobile games Honor of Kings and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile.

One startup looking to make it big in the scene is Singapore-based The Gentlebros, the company behind one of gaming platform Steam’s hidden gems, Cat Quest, and its sequel Cat Quest 2.

Best of both worlds

Founded in 2015, The Gentlebros is a gaming studio made up of game industry veterans. Co-founder and CEO Desmond Wong tells Tech in Asia that the startup’s founding team built the studio because they wanted to make games that are not only fun but also accessible to a wide range of gamers.

They also wanted the creative freedom that comes with creating an independent studio, allowing them to play beyond industry tropes.

“More often than not, casual games lack depth and tend not to appeal to the core gaming crowd, while hardcore games would seem too intimidating for the casual audience to play. This was a problem we wanted to solve with our games,” Wong shares.

Wong started The Gentlebros with Leon Ho and Nursyazana Zainal after they had worked together at Japan’s Koei Tecmo, the games publisher that’s best known for the Dead or Alive, Dynasty Warriors, and Ninja Gaiden franchises.

“Because of that – and being avid gamers ourselves – we know what kind of products the core gaming crowd would like to have. On top of this, our interests within the company vary widely as well,” he says.

Zainal plays a lot of casual mobile games, while Wong and Ho play the more hardcore titles. Their shared experiences helped shape Cat Quest to what it is today: a game that blends the best elements from both worlds.

Wong says that during the development of its flagship title, the company took aspects from a hardcore open-world role-playing game and made the controls incredibly accessible. This allowed Cat Quest to become a simple yet deep product that has something for any kind of gamer.

The founding team received a government grant to help get The Gentlebros off the ground. The company hasn’t received any outside investments after that, but it says it remains open to the idea should it find the right partners.

Playing their cards right