In today’s ‘Meet the Members’ blogpost we talk to Alastair Hebson from Caboodle Games.
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.
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Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your position in the company
Hi! I’m Alastair! Founder and partner at Caboodle Games. I’m originally from Scotland and currently live in Amsterdam.
Guerrilla Games hired me as a game designer many years ago. I planned to stay for a couple of years but I ended up loving NL so much that a decade went by and I’m still here!
After leaving Guerrilla I did a few things. I started a small game dev studio and made no money. I helped teams pitch games. I worked as a consultant game designer. Studios hired me to review their (and their competitor’s) projects. It was a fun bunch of work.
Eventually, I figured out that helping studios publish and sell more games was super fun and super important. The indie team behind the SUPERHOT franchise hired me to help them with this. We became super smart about diligently selling and self-publishing our games on every platform and store possible.
Caboodle Games spun out of this work. A couple of years ago it became clear that there are teams out there who make great games but don’t necessarily have the time or expertise to manage the commercial side of things.
This is what Caboodle helps with. We’re here to help your games work as hard for you as you did for them. We do this work mostly for self-published teams but increasingly also for publishers looking to help improve long-tail sales.
We would love to see (or hear) some of your work! Please show us some examples of your recent projects.
Ha, this is tricky, sadly business development, commercial support and self-publishing don’t yet generate lots of cool concept art or gameplay gifs.
We did recently bag one of our teams a very last-minute Weekend Deal slot on Steam. This promotion saw the team hitting the highest day of sales in the game’s 6+ year lifetime.
There are a bunch of other NDA’d charts that show how our changes in pricing or sales or subscription deal strategy helped teams make a boatload more money.
Neither of these examples is the most exciting thing in the world but we’re proud of this work, it really helps the teams financially.
On a personal level, I’m proud of the work we did helping a team navigate a stressful few months of development and legal drama. Making games is the hardest thing ever and being able to support our partners through the highs and lows of game dev feels great.
How long have you been a DGA member and what is your main reason for joining? What can DGA do to help your company?
We’ve been a member for around 3 years. The main reason to join was to feel more connected with the Dutch industry. It’s important to keep up-to-date with what is going on locally.
Caboodle is doing more and more work in Asia, specifically Japan and China. The trade missions being organised by the DGA are really interesting and should be a big help to us moving forward.
What ambitions/plans do you have for your company?
Slow and steady growth. We recently brought on Fernando Rizo as a partner. He was previously chief of publishing at Raw Fury, spent time at publisher Hooded Horse and founded Modern Wolf.
Moving forward we might want to bring on board one or two more experienced partners like this but we’re definitely in no hurry. I believe successful, sustainable businesses that do great work take time and care to build.
Anything else you would like to share with us?
We do a little bit of pro-bono work for new studios or smaller titles. Looking ahead I’d like to do more of this work. We’re always happy to chat and help teams when we can!
And thanks to the DGA for all they do!
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Thank you, Alastair!
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.