While the video game industry is going through a difficult period marked by several dismissals and projects canceled, the independent Quebec studio Triple Boris is expanding with the creation of a new subsidiary, Dodo Tako, focused on the creation of “rallies” games. A success based on a more robust business model in the face of bad weather and a desire to perfect the supply of products, say the founders of the studio.
“I am not saying that we were spared. The industry is still going through a fairly intense crisis, it is not as if the money came out through our ears, but we know that we will deliver our next projects, ”affirms in an interview with Duty Simon Dansereau, president of Triple Boris.
First of these projects, the Nintendo Switch version of the multiplayer game Where is Billy?released on the Steam platform last year, has been available since Thursday. Will come then Hack’n’Stackanother game of ” party »Multiplayer, whose exit is scheduled in 2026.
“Create a community”
Under the Dodo Tako brand, Jean-Philippe Pinsonneault, technical director at Triple Boris, hopes to cultivate knowledge in the studio to produce better games. He gives the example of Where is Billy?which is a kind of “test” for Hack’n’Stack.
The creation of a multiplayer game architecture that explores online or in person (or both at the same time) as well as the adaptation of a product to all types of controllers is knowledge that the team has acquired by working on the first title and that it will reuse in the next projects. “For the future, we are continued to make inclusive multiplayer,” says Simon Dansereau.
In the longer term, Jean-Philippe Pinsonneault wants to “build a community around Dodo Tako games” and make them accessible. “Ultimately, if someone bought the game just for an evening, and that he had a nice evening with friends at $ 20, I find that it is still a good investment,” he said.
In addition to “fiscal and administrative” reasons, in particular linked to financing by the Canada Media Fund, Dodo Tako was created to strengthen a more childish and less serious brand image, explains Simon Dansereau.
A SERVICE STUDIO
But if Dodo Tako is now the company responsible for creating games, Triple Boris still exists and continues its main activity: being a source of funding for homemade projects by serving as a service studio. “We want to be taken more seriously by the AAA studios of this world that will do business with us,” continues Mr. Dansereau.
Concretely, larger studios can start Triple Boris to carry out contracts to help the development of their games. Triple Boris artists and programmers are therefore called upon to work on multiple projects. “And when they are between two contracts, we often make them work on our own games. This means that our generics are long in relation to the complexity of our games, but it is not all these people working full-time, “notes between two laughs Jean-Philippe Pinsonneault.
The appearance of the new subsidiary is therefore mainly organizational, and Triple Boris will continue to operate as it has done since its foundation, in 2016, by the late Karl Tremblay, food cowboys, and Simon Dansereau. “When, with Karl, we decided to found a video game studio, we knew we wanted to make our own games that wanted to be unifying … except that we had to find a way to finance them,” says the latter. This is where I, inspired by the work that I had done a few years ago, I proposed to Karl to create a service studio and to reinvest all the profits to develop homemade games. And that’s what we did with our first projects. »»
In constant evolution
Despite a first mobile game, Left-right. The manorwhich was a certain success, the other titles of the studio did not have the same commercial flight. “Over the years, we are not more crazy than another, we realized that the mobile, for independent studios, is very difficult. Where there is still a niche that is available for indies, These are games on Steam, ”says Jean-Philippe Pinsonneault.
The company still managed to get out of it and continue to produce new titles by trying different avenues, because, from Simon Dansereau’s confession, “the service part is still quite paid”. Even if it is not just any studio that can be improvised as such, he warns. “We started with what small, then there, it gained momentum. »»
How does the president see the future of these two studios? Hard to project himself, he says, but he claims to hope that sales of the Dodo Tako Games will be sufficient to finance future projects, as “it is not the ideas that are missing”.
And, at worst, Simon Dansereau believes that “at the end of the crisis, the big studios will do business with service studios more than ever”. “It is returned that 700, 800 people must work on a big game. Then, once it came out, the studio must let the world go. It doesn’t make sense. This is where doing business with studios like Triple Boris for certain aspects, it really makes sense. »»
