As Crimson Herring releases second game, founder calls for provincial tax credit
On the heels of its recent acquisition by a Calgary-based game company, and amidst an increasingly tough funding environment for game development, Crimson Herring Studios is releasing its second PC game in as many years.
The studio, founded in 2020, released Hunter's Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate Adventure on Nov. 24, not long after Calgary's Zugalu Entertainment acquired Crimson Herring for an undisclosed sum, and made the studio's founder, Isaac Otway, Zugalu's chief operating officer.
The acquisition was not in Crimson Herring's original plan, Otway told Taproot, but evolved from challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, changing investor habits, and increasingly elusive public dollars and missing tax credits for game development.
"There was a lot more funding sloshing around with the low interest rates during COVID," Otway said. "When you take other forms of entertainment off the table (like film and television), it sort of funnelled everybody into the entertainment types that were remaining, like video games."
Hunter's Moon is a prequel to Crimson Herring's first game, Sovereign Syndicate, and saw more than 25,000 Steam (which is basically the Amazon of PC games) users add it to their purchase wish list.
The game will be published in 14 languages, and that's intentional, Otway said. "A part of our business is that the majority of our sales happen all over the world, in currencies and locations that aren't in Canada," he said, adding that video games are tariff-proof when sold as a digital product as opposed to a physical medium.
Sovereign Syndicate, Crimson Herring's first game, is set in a fantasy, steampunk version of Victorian-era London, and has virtually no combat and is largely based in narrative. Hunter's Moon, meanwhile, is a prequel that has more combat and uses a more run-based model, which emphasizes the ability to replay over a narrative beginning, middle, and end. The new game cost $350,000 to make, as compared to Sovereign Syndicate, which cost about $2 million and has since sold more than 40,000 digital copies across more than 100 countries. (Crimson Herring and Zugalu employ a cumulative 12 full-time staff, while about 84 people worked on the new game.)
But Otway said that despite the lower cost, it has been more difficult to fund Hunter's Moon's creation. In addition to tighter purse strings from investors, competition has grown for public subsidies like the Canada Media Fund, he said.
"When we applied and got funded for Sovereign Syndicate, we were applying against somewhere between … 70 and 90 other studios, of which they would fund about 12," Otway said. "In the last intake that we applied for, where we weren't successful in getting funded, there were 162 applicants, but they were still only funding 12. You could say it's now twice as competitive as it used to be to get the same amount of money from Canada Media Fund."
Otway founded Crimson Herring in 2020, when the film and television industry screeched to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Investment in video games, which are easier to make than many other forms of entertainment when people are remote, surged during lock downs but quickly contracted once Hollywood returned to making movies. The short-lived boom, and support from Edmonton Screen and other public money, saw Crimson Herring release Sovereign Syndicate at the start of 2024.
