Part of a larger interview on Eurogamer:
I think it's interesting to see how even wildly successful games like Rocket League can still teeter on the edge of disaster if the business side of things isn't worked out to perfection.
Imagine a world where this was console exclusive for a time, or the PC version suffered some unexpected last minute delay, or something along those lines.
It's easy to picture the scenario in which a week after launch the Psyonix Multiplayer servers suddenly go dark, people write it off as some lame PS+ indie that nobody cares about, the PC release is met with a shrug, and Rocket League is totally forgotten. Truly the darkest timeline.
Rocket League launched in the summer of 2015 and seemed to be everywhere at once. If you owned a PlayStation 4 and enjoyed having a nice time, you were likely one of six million players who downloaded the game within its first month on PlayStation Plus. Or perhaps you purchased a PC copy instead, in which case, you actually kept the whole thing afloat, whether you realised it or not. It turns out running a successful online multiplayer game is an expensive process.
"I didn't know if we were going to cover server costs," remembered design director, Corey Davis at a recent GDC talk. "Steam covered everything and they pay very quickly, which was important. I can't really imagine what we would have done if we'd shipped only on PlayStation 4 and got that many users."
I think it's interesting to see how even wildly successful games like Rocket League can still teeter on the edge of disaster if the business side of things isn't worked out to perfection.
Imagine a world where this was console exclusive for a time, or the PC version suffered some unexpected last minute delay, or something along those lines.
It's easy to picture the scenario in which a week after launch the Psyonix Multiplayer servers suddenly go dark, people write it off as some lame PS+ indie that nobody cares about, the PC release is met with a shrug, and Rocket League is totally forgotten. Truly the darkest timeline.