Tabletop gaming company started in the bedrooms of co-founders Mat Hart and Rich Loxam in 2014.
The company now employs between 40 and 50 people at its warehouse-cum-office space in Trafford Park and, last year, the firm was crowned M.E.N. Business of the Year winner in the £5m-£10m turnover category.
Loxam, based in Manchester, says Steamforged Games started when Hart, who lives in Chelmsford, Essex, messaged him on Twitter.
He explains: “I didn’t know Mat, it was about eight or nine years ago and I was playing a lot of games myself and was quite a highly-ranked player in the tournament scene.
“He asked if I had any tips to help him out and I looked at his profile and he was working at Ninja Theory, a computer game company down in the south of England.
“I was a digital designer, so I’ve always been interested in modelling and the computer game industry so I got chatting to him and we became good friends and we sat down at a tournament a couple years later.
“We said we could make a game and that’s when we started coming up with concepts. Mat was a very big thinker and I was more into the details, so we were filling in the concepts with characters and how it would work and we kind of flowed.”
The pair eventually came up with their first game, Guild Ball, a sports-based miniature game, which it then launched through a Kickstarter campaign, generating £130,000.
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“It was meant to be a small thing and a hobby project to see what it would do but within a year we had made £1m turnover on that product alone,” Loxam says.
The pair say a lot of their success has come from creating their own niche.
Hart says: “Why be competitive and why go to all that effort if you can actually choose somewhere that no one else actually exists?
“We look to disrupt current baseline assumptions, so we will look for a gap in the market or we will look for two things that are successful and we’ll just smash them together and see what it looks like and create a new sub-genre.
“Suddenly we’re the only people in that space...and the advantage is massive and owning a space is massive and it’s incredibly hard for someone else to come into a space that you dominate.”
The company now has two original games - Guild Ball and God Tear - and is also responsible for tabletop versions of licenced games including Resident Evil 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Dark Souls - Devil May Cry: The Bloody Palace.
Loxam said creating Dark Souls, its first licenced game, “shot us into another world”, selling some 40,000 units through the Kickstarter campaign and a further 50,000 from retail in the first year.
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After its release, the pair “realised we can’t both do the creative side, someone’s got to drive the business side while the other one keeps the creative side bubbling”.
Loxam took on the chief executive role, overseeing the business and production aspects, while Hart took control of the design and creative side, coming up with ideas and getting IPs.
Hart says the timescale of coming up with an idea and bringing it to market is “really flexible”.
“God Tear was a tiny idea that I had about two-and-a-half to three years ago and then I sat on it for about a year and a half just mulling it over and doing that world building and thinking about how a game could work.”
He says he ideally wants the initial design phase to be about 12 months, however, creating Steamforged’s second original game was a “like a difficult second album” and took longer. “Guild Ball felt effortless but with God Tear there was a lot of pressure to really come up with something again and replicate the same response we had from the playerbase again.”
Hart says, when creating games, the world needs to be extensible, so the business can keep releasing new content and making money.
“We’re a business, so we need to have a commercially viable product, so it’s identifying something in the marketplace that makes a lot of sense and starting to build a world that is simple and compatible with that view.
“Once you’ve got those boring base layers in place then you need to start thinking about how we make it unique, how to make it interesting and, more importantly, how do you create a hook that people just get as quickly as possible.”
Loxam says: “We always say it’s like a train. [Mat] was laying the path and I was bringing the train up behind him and pulling it through.”
“The lovely job that I inherited was to grow this company from nowhere to basically where we are now and try to stabilise that.”
Loxam says growing the company in the space of four years from a small £50,000 turnover to “basically £8m to £9m” was a “big job” and managing without experience “was tough”.
But last year, Steamforged Games secured £5m investment from Foresight Group, which has allowed them to scale up and employ more people in senior-level positions.
Loxam says this year has been about “settling down” and “solidifying its base” and “building that senior level team and now it’s not just the me and Mat show any more. “It’s turning from entrepreneurial into...a more structured environment so we can actually support the growth and the opportunity we’ve been given”.
“I think we know our industry and we’ve always said me and Mat are a nucleus, but we always questioned if we were making the right marketing decisions and if we were making the right commercial avenues,” he says.
“What it’s allowed us to do is get individuals around us, such as experts in marketing, experts in logistics and put that structure piece around what we created, which now we know we’re starting to see the benefits of.”
As part of the investment, Ian Livingstone CBE, one of the founding fathers of the 海角视频 games industry and co-founder of Games Workshop, joined Steamforged as a non-executive director.
Loxam says: “Financials are great, don’t get me wrong, it helps the company, but more importantly it helps get the experience level in place to really go ‘well we’ve got an opportunity here we’ve got great partners and great licensing partners, we could make great IP ourselves, so how do we grow it, where do we grow it and who can guide us with that?’”
“It’s not just about Mat and I but the wider team.
“We’ve got a lot of people here that rely on us and we want to give them an opportunity to really carve their careers out.
“We have individuals here that started four years ago on packing and are now working on projects and we’ve got variety with the individuals that come in and we really want to see the whole ship lift up and really succeed in the industry and carve our name out as one of the better or one of the best tabletop game experiences out there.”
Since the investment, Steamforged increased its headcount by around 10.
“We’ve got end-to-end here,” Loxam says.
“Ideas from the creative team get passed onto the development team before reaching the production team, who will “take that idea and then re-mould it and the parts come in from China, and they’ll work with sculptors”.
The company’s logistics, commercial and marketing team are also at the Trafford base and some fulfilment also takes place at the warehouse.
Hart says the real benefits of the investment are yet to come.
“I think 2020 is when you’re going to see the real impact of what we’ve done, because a lot of our timeline is over a nine to 12 month lead, the things that are being worked on now are going to come out in August and September this year and that’s when you’re going to see the real growth,” he says.
Looking to the future, the company will remain focussed on its “two-pronged attack” of business, in creating both original and licenced games.
Hart says: “We have the option now to increase the amount of original content that we make so we have two or three product lines that are coming out over the next six, 12 and 18 months.”
One of which is a game called Animal Adventures, for which they launched a Kickstarter campaign at the end of January.
Hart says it began as a “weird idea I had with our sculptor . . . and both play Dungeons and Dragons so we said it would be funny if your character got turned into a dog and then you had to play as a dog with a wizard’s hat on”.
“That’s where Dungeons and Doggies came from and then we did Cats and Catacombs and that’s now grown into its entire product range.”
Steamforged launch Kickstarter campaigns for every new release, which Hart says has enabled the “lowering of the barrier of entry”.
“Historically you’d need £30k to £40k of your own sweet money to invest in a prototype and then you’ll hope and pray that you can actually sell 5,000 units to recoup your money back.
“Now you can take that wonderful idea and put it on Kickstarter and present it in a way to see if people are as excited about it as you are and what that means is you get a huge amount of awesome ideas that will actually see the light of day.
“The quality bar goes down so the quality goes down, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, I just think it gives more consumers more choice and a broader spectrum to look at when they’re looking to part with a hundred dollars on the game.
“They now have options between top tier AAA products that cost millions of dollars to produce and indie games that might just cost you $20 but give you a cool experience that’s a bit innovative or quirky.” Loxam says he is constantly looking at the industry, evaluating where it is going and what is opening up.
He says the role-playing sector has benefitted from Netflix TV programme Stranger Things, in which the characters play Dungeons and Dragons.
“It’s a household name, it’s becoming that more and more, and I think people that are entering Dungeons and Dragons now are not necessarily people who sit down with a bunch of friends with a book and play the game.
“People want more immersive experiences and really see the visuals of that world.
“I think that’s where Steamforged are uniquely poised to help that vision become reality.”
As well as creating the games, the Steamforged headquarters also houses a tabletop gaming space called The Forge.
“It’s an offshoot of our business. It started out as a bit of a staff perk . . . and then we thought we might as well open a little retail store.
“We now have 20 to 40 people come down and play Dungeons and Dragons every week and it’s great to see that interaction and meet the people who want to play our games.”