'It's a lot easier to get lots of little trickles of revenue from smaller, low-risk projects than massive mega projects.'
How do you build a franchise in a way that's sustainable ? It's a question the industry is grappling with from top to bottom, with the largest studios attempting to craft billion-dollar series capable of crossing the transmedia divide and smaller devs perhaps hoping to turn their indie darlings into household names.
UK developer Hollow Ponds, the outfit behind Flock, Hohokum, and Wilmot's Warehouse, might have found an answer.
The studio, along with a team of frequent collaborators, has crafted a burgeoning franchise around an unlikely figure. Enter Wilmot, the beaming warehouse manager and star of organizational puzzler Wilmot's Warehouse. Five years after the title debuted, Wilmot has swapped the stock-taking for jigsaw-making in laid back sequel Wilmot Works It Out. At around the same time, Hollow Ponds also unveiled the Wilmot's Warehouse board game–a cooperative rollick developed with help from design studio and publisher CMYK and board game-focused outlet Shut Up & Sit Down.
Discussing how they transformed Wilmot from blue collar worker into an unassuming leading man, Hollow Ponds founder and creative director Ricky Haggett explains the studio initially benefited from a series of rather happy accidents–but a propensity for pragmatism also paid off. "We weren't like 'we're going to go big on Wilmot,'" explains Haggett, noting the board game and the video game sequel were "two completely different things."
Although they eventually launched at a similar time, the board game actually coalesced during the pandemic. Before lockdown, Haggett would host regular board game hangouts with a few friends, including game designer, researcher, and lecturer David King. King has made a bunch of board games and would often bring concepts to those soirees–including a very roughshod morsel inspired by Wilmot's Warehouse.
King unveiled that particular concept during the very last meeting the group held before COVID-19 (and lockdowns) took hold. Yet, despite being in the primordial stages of development, Haggett was able to refine the idea, which riffs on the concept of the video game without replicating it directly, throughout the pandemic by continuing to host virtual game nights.
"We started figuring out what be a good size of grid. We started figuring out what a good cadence adding objects [would be]," he says. "For a while, we had things being added and taken away constantly. We had lots and lots of cards, which did lots of weird spatial things to the warehouse. We made lots of changes, and we just gradually whittled it down in a very unpressured way."
Time and freedom. Two things most game developers crave, but can very rarely count on.
Haggett says that by constantly tweaking the project during the pandemic, he was able to reach a point where it was 80 percent done by the time he approached CMYK. Shut Up & Sit Down production and marketing manager Matt Lees also provided valuable feedback that "fixed the last weird problem" plaguing the project–which largely revolved around how to end the game by way of a frantic card-matching (or order fulfilment) phase. "The whole experience of designing that game was ego free," says Haggett. "People from all directions were suggesting things and having an open chat. [...] None of it generally felt stressful. It's actually a lovely antitheses to trying to fix all the bugs in Flock."
So, where is the overlap between Wilmot's exploits in the digital and physical realms? Well, it's difficult to untangle. Haggett says Hollow Ponds has noticed Wilmot's Warehouse sales spikes that could be linked to the launch of the board game–although with the sequel also hitting shelves at a similar time, it's hard to separate the two. It has, however, visibly expanded the Wilmot footprint–a soaring achievement given the character's lack of feet. "We've definitely see people talk about the video game on board game-centric places saying 'hey, this is a video game as well,' and we've definitely seen people who just like the video game buying the board game, even though they're not necessarily board game people."
There's cross-pollination, then, but what about the financial aspect? Haggett says Hollow Ponds hasn't quite made its money back on first quarter sales of the board game, but that it isn't far off. He notes that second quarter sales will include the holidays and retailers who've just ordered units, and feels the board game will be akin to a snowball gathering momentum. As we've already mentioned, it also landed at a fortuitous time, placing more eyes on Wilmot as Hollow Ponds prepared to debut a sequel in Wilmot Works It Out.
Haggett tells us that Wilmot's Warehouse is still pulling in thousands of pounds each quarter, but massively surpassed expectations when it launched in 2019 thanks in part to an Xbox Game Pass deal the studio secured. The company then received cash from Sony to deliver a PlayStation port. Haggett acknowledges those deals, however, are by no means guaranteed and advises caution when working on titles of that scale. "I think if you were making a Wilmot-sized game I would be scared of spending more than around £200,000," he says.
He explains the budget for Wilmot Works It Out was bigger but still in the "low hundreds of thousands of pounds." Hollow Ponds also secured financing from the UK Games Fund (£25,000) that allowed them to hire a programmer to create a prototype, which according to Haggett was "pretty much what the game ended up being." It helped that Haggett was able to kickstart the project by taking the source code from Wilmot's Warehouse and stripping out all of the warehouse jiggery-pokery to create a "little jigsaw prototype." Meanwhile, Wilmot co-creator Richard Hogg set about creating the artwork that would become the myriad of jigsaws featured in-game, taking on a huge amount of work in the process.
Haggett estimates production took around 12 months in total, although that time was spread across years due to the need to support other projects. Wilmot Works It Out launched on Steam on October 23, 2024, for £12.79 (a similar price point to the first game) and sold twice as well as its predecessor during its first month on shelves. It marks the second title the studio has released in 2024 after multiplayer adventure Flock, which was a much larger and more complex undertaking.
Haggett says Flock hasn't sold "incredibly well" but again highlights that Hollow Ponds was able to sign an Xbox Game Pass deal, presumably mitigating some financial risk. He remains "very happy" with the game itself, and notes the reception and feedback from players has been "great." Still, cashflow is important–and therein lies the balancing act.
"Making big things is useful," says Haggett, explaining how Flock and I Am Dead enabled the company to secure larger amounts of funding and work with influential publishers such as Annapurna Interactive. "But you can't guarantee you're going to be able to find publishers to fund your video games, and if you can't do that then it's helpful if you have smaller projects to fill in the cash flow at times," he continues.
"You know, we're not a studio that has all of our employees working on a game. We don't really have many employees at all–we're a husband and wife team with one producer as a full-time employee. So when we finished Flock we didn't have 20 people to support between projects. If we did we'd be screwed.
"Nonetheless, there are gaps between [projects]. Even in the best case scenario there are naturally gaps. And its nice to be able to fill those with the smaller projects that bring in money that bumps the cashflow. Every little thing you have out there in the world is a little revenue stream, and it's a lot easier to get lots of little trickles of revenue from smaller, low-risk projects than massive mega projects."
In an era when phrases like 'survive to 2025' have (perhaps rather naively) been tossed around, perhaps there's something to be said for tempering blockbuster ambitions and championing reliable stalwarts like Wilmot.
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