GR: Your studio announced Guacamelee 2 at Paris Games Week in 2017 and then did not show much of the game until last month when you only revealed the release date. Why was Guacamelee 2 so secretive?
GS: We learned from trying to promote Severed. We announced Severed too early and brought it to too many shows. We experienced what I call “press fatigue” where it was hard to get people to come chat with us. So we didn’t get a huge marketing push at the very end because everyone had met with us and written articles beforehand. We tried to have a slightly different strategy this time around where we waited until closer to the end, made sure we had review codes early, and tried to do a final big press push at the end. It seems like people are genuinely excited. There’s more buzz around Guacamelee 2 than I remember having before our other launches.
GR: The Infierno DLC and Super Turbo Championship Edition were both great ways to expand on the first game. Are there any plans to do the same with Guacamelee 2?
GS: Although I can’t say 100 percent, I’m pretty certain we won’t do a Super Turbo Championship Edition again. Mainly because people were upset that they didn’t get the best version of the game and they felt like they had to rebuy the STCE. We don’t want to ever alienate our audience. When we released the Super Turbo Championship Edition, we did our best to give discounts. But a lot of people felt like it was an incremental update and they didn’t want to have to rebuy it. But we spent almost a year of time adding new content and making fixes and upgrading our rendering tech. We can’t just give our hard work away for free.
We did our best to discount the game for anybody who owned the original but it simply was not possible on some of the platforms like in North America. Sony wouldn’t let us do it. In Europe, they did let us do it. On Steam we did it, but we couldn’t keep it like that when we wanted to start putting the game on discounts. When we wanted to discount it by 50 percent, it got really complicated how it would work if you owned the original game. So we had to discontinue the discount after a few months.
It just turned out to be such a big headache. And then dealing with people afterwards who missed the discount period who still wanted it or felt like we were trying to rip them off. People were saying stuff like ‘I’m never buying a game from Drinkbox again.’ It’s like ‘OK you don’t know the whole story here.’ [Because of all that] we decided that we don’t want to do a Super Turbo Championship Edition again.
We could do some DLC. We’re talking about that right now. We want to work on something relatively small that we can work on for a few months while we try and figure out what next big project we’re gonna take on, which we haven’t yet determined. People are starting to think of ideas for that and there’s some pretty interesting ideas. I’m not sure what it’ll be or when it’ll happen.
GR: How do you feel about all the other newer Metroidvanias that you’ve had to compete with now between the first Guacamelee and Guacamelee 2?
GS: I used to say that the rising tide raises all boats. That’s kind of the philosophy I have at least when I’m talking to other indie developers. Indie developers go out of their way to help other indie developers. It’s not like the corporate world where everyone is trying to undercut everyone else to get a leg up on their opponents. So from that perspective, I love to see all these other indie games coming out and doing well.
But there’s a reason why corporate America is so cutthroat. It’s because sometimes your competition is stealing your sales. If you have three Metroidvania games coming out back to back to back, maybe you’re not going to have time to pick all of them. Maybe a customer of Guacamelee might not buy the game because they’re still playing Dead Cells and then they forget about Guacamelee. I think that’s unfortunate but still the best games are going to survive and do well and I think that’s good for everybody. I’m happy that all these great games are coming out. At the same time, I worry about cannibalizing each other’s sales at launch.
I can say for myself that I still haven’t played Dead Cells. It’s next on my list. Right now, I’m replaying Hollow Knight. It’s my second playthrough because I 100 percented it on PC and then it came on Switch. When I beat it the first time, I thought it was an amazing Metroidvania. And this time, as I’m playing through it, it might be my favorite Metroidvania that I’ve ever played.
GR: Is Guacamelee 2 coming to other platforms?
GS: We don’t know yet because we have a co-marketing agreement with Sony. So we do have an exclusivity period but we are not allowed to talk about the details of that.
