“Ours is an industry built around the adage ‘adapt or die,'” says Raphael van Lierop, B.C.-based Hinterland Studio Inc. founder, CEO and lead creative officer. “This gives game developers an inherent comfort with change, and with dynamic situations where we have to make good decisions without having all the answers in front of us. It lends a kind of resilience and confidence that we can find a way to succeed, regardless of the circumstances.
A customer walks past Animal Crossing video game characters at a Nintendo store in Tokyo, on June 10, 2020.And games don’t even need to be explicitly social in their play and mechanics in order scratch the social itch. The Long Dark — a critically acclaimed single-player survival game set in the remote Canadian wilderness made by Hinterland — brings people together in other ways.
“It’s entirely possible to build, release and sell a game without leaving your home, which makes it a very safe occupation right now, and not at all disrupted like a lot of other industries that depend on workers or customers being physically on-site,” says van Lierop. While he misses working face-to-face with his collaborators and eagerly anticipates a time when they can work together in the same space once more, Cash is taking advantage of the fact that his entire team is very capable of doing their jobs — art, design, programming, marketing — from their homes.It also helps that the vast majority of games can be purchased and downloaded through digital storefronts on consoles, PCs, and mobile devices rather than requiring a visit to a physical store.
Hilchie points to Other Ocean. Whereas companies in other industries have been tripping over themselves as they attempt to rapidly transition to e-commerce business models, Other Ocean has been selling online since its inception — not just in North America, but all over the world. And the company’s overseas sales have only grown during the pandemic.
“We’ve kept an open dialogue as a team about how we’re dealing with things, who is struggling, supporting each other, and making it OK to acknowledge that these are strange times and that what matters most is that we all get through this as a team, together.”