Twilight Towers and Beyond

Hello Friends --

We meet once again.

It's been some time since I last checked in. Partly because the PR team said we have established "sufficient brand identity" and partly because I am a secretive creature by nature. But alas, the time for the shadowed caves is behind us. Fortis begins to emerge into the light. In the upcoming months we'll begin soft launching games and seeing what magic may come from them; The first, Twilight Towers, which will soft launch next week in Philippines and Mexico, is just the beginning.

Twilight Towers came to us through an atypical path. Most of Fortis's games are being developed from scratch, but Twilight Towers is built on the foundation of an acquisition we made last year. We hope the work we've put into the game improves upon the great gameplay that came before and the players take roost and help us grow it into a successful product. Early days, but we're excited.

While I’m here, permit me a tangent. A minor meander. There's more to be said on the subject of where our industry is at. It's also an excellent opportunity to go beyond the word allotment those tyrants running PR tried to impose upon me. 500 words?! Barely a mental morsel. We deal in thought banquets here MARCUS.

[Note from MARCUS: This is why I asked Shawn to write a blog, and not a 280-character tweet. You can continue now Shawn…]

Acquisitions, Hires, and Publishing. Oh My.

Fortis made a few acquisitions early on. Those acquisitions gave us a set of teams that had built successful games together before, had strong leaders, and put us in a spot to recruit in geographies we wanted to be present in.

Since those acquisitions, we've built great teams in places like Brazil, Romania, Portugal, the UK, Canada and other locations. Embracing global talent was always a major hallmark of our strategy and we continue to believe in that approach.

The market has shifted these last few years. There are great games and teams that fall by the wayside due to little more than bad luck, timing, or a lack of access. When the capital was plentiful (and somewhat indiscriminate) there were fewer examples of this, but things are different now. The firehose of money aimed at content has slowed to a trickle and it has created an enormous gap in the market. A diversity of capital -- user acquisition funds, venture capitalists, Kickstarters, etc. -- is a good thing for the industry but those capital sources tend to underestimate the difficulty of building a game and publishing operation, which leaves many games stranded on the cusp of release with no clear path forward.

So we've expanded our approach, going beyond those early game team acquisitions, taking a broader look at opportunities.

Over the last year Fortis has been quietly building the capabilities to fill an industry gap, and give those games and teams, with high potential but in a precarious position, a chance to thrive. That takes a few forms: (1) setting up third-party publishing, (2) acquiring teams/games we see promise in but are stuck, (3) batch hiring great teams that came close and want to take another shot.

We've been doing all three while continuing to build our internal portfolio up. If you and your team feels like it's falling into that gap I described above, don't be a stranger; visit us at LinkedIn and we can see if there's a fit. If you've been displaced by the recent studio closures, we also have a number of positions open here.

Onward and Upward.

I'm excited that Twilight Towers is in our portfolio, just as I’m excited for the half dozen other games we're building to follow it. These games are diverse in their genre and intended audience, but they're all experiences we believe players will love and build community around.

Fortis has gone through any number of evolutions as we put together our games, but one thing has remained consistent: We want to build games where people belong.

Building new, original games isn't for the faint of heart. It's an underdeveloped discipline atrophying as large companies focus on their core franchises and cut new development while other sources of funding shift away from content. While I'm all for picks and shovels, someone needs to be mining for gold.

We're going to keep at it. We're sure there's gold in them thar hills and we're excited to share it with you. Be on the lookout for more releases. Things are brewing, and there's more to come.