Interview: Suda51 explains why Grasshopper’s going solo with Romeo is a Dead Man, and what’s next

There’s never a dull moment to speak to Goichi Suda (aka Suda51), but it’s currently a particularly notable time for his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture.

Not only has it just announced that the release date for Romeo is a Dead Man – the studio’s first original IP in a decade – is only a couple of months away, but it’s also revealed that it will be self-published.

This is uncharted territory for a studio that usually teams up with publishers for its game releases, and a particularly unusual decision given that Grasshopper is owned by NetEase, the massive Chinese company that has more than its fair share of experience publishing games.

Earlier this year, Game File sources claimed NetEase was significantly scaling back its operations and actively shopping around its non-Chinese studios – a claim the company denied at the time.

Shortly before Grasshopper’s announcement was made, I sat down with Suda and his interpreter for an exclusive chat about the decision to self-publish, the current status of Grasshopper’s relationship with NetEase, and future plans beyond the release of Romeo is a Dead Man.

Can I just clarify before we start that the announcement here is that Grasshopper is self-publishing Romeo is a Dead Man, but that it hasn’t completely cut its ties with NetEase?

So, there are actually two main things that are going to be announced. The first one is that, yes, we’re going to be self-publishing Romeo is a Dead Man. It’s not that we’ve cut relations with NetEase or anything. They’re still our parent company. They’re still around, but we will be self-publishing it, with some assistance – mainly up until recently – from them. I’d like to make sure this gets across though – we currently plan on continuing as a NetEase first-party studio.

The second thing is we’re going to be announcing the release date, finally, as well. The release date is going to be set for February 11th. So it’s not exactly on Valentine’s Day, but having the Romeo and Juliet themes and everything, we’re kind of going for a My Bloody Valentine type theme with the general release window.

So is the aim then for partners to sit on the couch on Valentine’s Day and play it together, or is it aimed more at scorned lovers who are on their own to play the game alone and curse the idea of love?

*laughs* Probably a bit of both! A bit of both would probably fit best for this game.

What was the process behind deciding to self-publish Romeo’s Dead Man? Grasshopper has published its games with many different companies over the years. It seems like this is a new direction for the studio to go.

We can’t really discuss everything that went on, obviously. But basically, I guess this is kind of a two-part answer. First, regarding not having the game published by NetEase, we actually talked to a number of publishers about possibly publishing Romeo is a Dead Man for us. Some we actually got really close to a deal with. Some we actually got to the point where we were exchanging drafts of contracts and everything. But obviously, it wasn’t really a good fit for us, for them, for both of us, for whatever reason.

And in the end, we talked with NetEase. We spoke with our publishing team, our QA team, their publishing teams. We had a whole bunch of different talks, and we decided that self-publishing would be the way to go for this game.

It wasn’t like “okay, well, nobody will pick it up”, so we decided “okay, screw it, we’ll do it ourselves”, it wasn’t because of that. For one thing, NetEase really did us a solid, basically, in helping us to work out a deal in which we would get as much of the profits from sales and stuff of the game as we could, as Grasshopper.

Also, we decided that if we’re going to self-publish our own game – or possibly our own games – then this would be the place to start. Being a brand new IP and everything, we wanted to take this, and we wanted to be able to put out this game exactly the way that we wanted to put it out on our own terms. We wanted to get gamers and Grasshopper fans all over to be able to get the game that we wanted to put out, how we wanted to put it out.

So, yeah, it’s not like there’s a whole bunch of bad blood, or we just kept getting the door shut in our face or anything like that. It was a combination of different factors. But, yeah, again, we decided “okay, if we’re going to do self-publishing…” – not saying this is what we’re going to do with every game from now on – but “if we’re going to do self-publishing, this is the game we want to start with”,

“Being a brand new IP and everything, we wanted to take this, and we wanted to be able to put out this game exactly the way that we wanted to put it out on our own terms. We wanted to get gamers and Grasshopper fans all over to be able to get the game that we wanted to put out, how we wanted to put it out.”

When we met at Gamescom, we were talking about the Switch 2, and at that point, a lot of studios were still just getting their hands on it, so it was considered a bit too early at that stage to discuss any projects. Now that we’re a few months on, can you speak a bit more about Switch 2 projects, whether that’s a Switch 2 version of Romeo is a Dead Man or anything else coming further down the line?

To me personally, and to us at Grasshopper, Nintendo platforms are really important to us. They acted as a jumping board for us to really get into the industry and get into people’s eyeballs, so we definitely have no plans to ignore the Switch 2.

We can’t announce or divulge anything just yet as far as Romeo is a Dead Man goes, but we are considering putting out Romeo on the Switch 2 at some point if possible. There’s just a lot of things that we’ve got to clear first.

For example, we’ve got to make sure it works on PC and the other platforms that have already been decided on. And since we’re using Unreal Engine 5 for Romeo is a Dead Man, we need to make sure that we can find a way that the engine is going to play nicely with Switch 2, using stuff like Nanite and Lumen and other things – some of them are new to us, some of them them might have issues with Switch 2, with porting and stuff.

So we can’t say anything concrete yet, but it’s something that we’d definitely like to do, and we’re definitely considering finding a way to put Romeo out on the Switch 2, and certainly other games in the future as well.

Obviously, Grasshopper has a strong focus on single-player story-based action games, but how do you feel about the apparent shift in trend towards online multiplayer and live service games, and the implication that this is where the money is to be made? Do you feel that there will continue to be a place for single-player action games like Romeo is a Dead Man, Shadows of the Damned, No More Heroes, or will you be tempted to start integrating live service or online multiplayer in your games in the future?

As far as online multiplayer games go, as you said, it’s a big part of the market, and when you think of video games as one entire market, and that’s a big part of it that’s making lots of money, that’s great. It’s helping the market in general.  There’s there’s a lot of companies that are really good at that, that’s their bread and butter, that’s what they do, that’s totally cool.

There’s a lot of esports-type stuff, that’s making lots of money, there’s a huge market for that – again, if it’s good for the market it’s generally good for everybody to some degree.

But that’s just not really our thing, and not really my thing in particular. That’s not to say that I would never play those games, or that I would never make one. It’s just that we make what we like, and we make what we know.

That said, I have been thinking for a while that I would like to try my hand at some sort of game that isn’t necessarily just straight-up fully online, you know, super multiplayer, but a game that has… it’s kind of hard to express this… a game that has online elements to it, and a large part of the game would be online, but there’s not really the clear-cut border between online multiplayer and single-player modes, if that makes any sense.

Something that’s… I guess ‘seamless’ might be a good word for it, something that’s not like “well, you have to play this with eight other people or it doesn’t work”, but at the the same time something that if if you wanted to play it by yourself you could, if you wanted to play it online you could, and neither of those modes would really clash, it would just kind of all work together. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and definitely something I’d like to try my hand at some point in the future.

Going back to NetEase, if we can. In the past, Grasshopper was owned by GungHo for seven or eight years, and obviously, there was a split during that time, which it’s said was down to issues in management. Now you’re owned by NetEase, and assuring us that’s still the case, and seemingly more amicable than that situation was.

That said, is there ever still a worry that when owned by a larger company like this, which is dealing with multiple going concerns, that at some point a balance sheet or financial report will come that highlights issues elsewhere in the company and results in cuts elsewhere in the company, and that Grasshopper could suffer as a result of that?

That is something that I worry about, and something that I get nervous about, but it’s not because we’re part of NetEase, or even because we’re part of a bigger company in general. It’s because we’re a business, and you know, regardless of who our parent company might be, or if we’re doing things completely on our own, we’re a business, and I’ve got to run the business.

And so, you know, what if something happens and our studio gets totally screwed? What if our game totally flops and we don’t get any money? As somebody running a business, that’s something that I have to think about and I have to be worried about, no matter what. So it’s not something that I worry about because we’re part of NetEase, or GungHo, or under a big company at all. It’s just something that I worry about because I’ve got people that I have to take care of.

And if you’re not worrying about that, then as somebody running a business, you probably should be. So, yeah, that’s definitely something that I think about a lot, and I have to constantly be conscious about when I make decisions and stuff, but – again – as somebody who’s running a business and is responsible for all these people, not because we’re working for these guys or working for those guys, you know?

“What if our game totally flops and we don’t get any money? As somebody running a business, that’s something that I have to think about and I have to be worried about, no matter what. So it’s not something that I worry about because we’re part of NetEase, or GungHo, or under a big company at all. It’s just something that I worry about because I’ve got people that I have to take care of.”

A few years back, you said that you had a 10-year plan that would involve releasing three big games. Assuming Romeo is a Dead Man is the first of these, and now that it’s approaching the end of its development, is the next plan to release something smaller or to just jump straight into another larger game with a similar budget?

At the moment, we’ve got a lot of things in motion. There’s stuff that hasn’t been announced yet, stuff we haven’t talked about yet. Stuff that even a lot of people in the company aren’t really fully aware of what’s going on or that it’s happening yet.

So we’re going to be putting out Romeo is a Dead Man, and we originally had the idea to make it part of basically a Dead Man trilogy. That’s not to say that’s definitely going to happen, or the next game is definitely going to be Romeo 2 or something. And it’s also not to say that if we do do the trilogy, then the next game will also be this big – not necessarily AAA, but AA, you know, the same scale as Romeo.

So we do have a lot of things going on. We’ve got a lot of things that we’re planning and a lot of things that we’re trying to plan. Some of them are kind of interwoven, some of them are just completely separate.

This is kind of going off on a tangent here, but when we think about “let’s make this game next” we don’t really think about things like “okay, well, the last game we put out was pretty big, so let’s make something smaller” or, conversely “the last game we made was somewhat small, so let’s make something really big”, or “let’s top our last one” or anything like that. We just think: “Okay, what do we want to put out? What do we want to make? What do we think people want to play?”

So as far as the three… I guess you could say the three ‘killer’ type games over the next 10 years, that’s not necessarily an exact plan, but at the same time, it’s not exactly something we’ve gotten rid of either. As I mentioned, we’re still considering having Romeo be the first part of a three-game series, and – if we do end up doing that – the next game could be something even bigger than Romeo is a Dead Man, or it could be something smaller, like an even smaller AA game or just a full-on indie game.

So the three-game series thing isn’t necessarily saying they’re all going to be Romeo / No More Heroes / Shadows of the Damned size or anything, but we do have a lot of things in motion and a lot of plans that are not just “oh, it’d be kind of cool to do this”, but things we’re actually working on at the moment. And hopefully we’ll be able to meet the expectations that people who have heard about this 10-year plan have, and hopefully we’ll be able to actually top those expectations.

We now live in a world with TikTok and Instagram, where everyone has a camera on them all times. Surely this is the time for Michigan 2.

[Note: Michigan: Report from Hell was a PS2 game created and produced by Suda, where the player controls a cameraman in a series of horrific scenarios]

As far as Michigan goes, that’s something that I would definitely like to revisit or bring back in some form at some time.

And so if possible, I hope I’ll be able to speak with Spike Chunsoft and make it a reality somehow, hopefully sooner rather than later. But yeah, that’s something that I’ve been wanting to go back to for a while.

Finally, when the NetEase deal was originally started, you said that this was essentially now “Grasshopper version 5.1”. I’m just wondering, a few years down the line, what version we’re at now?

Yeah, we’re probably still at version 5.1 for now, and we’ll probably be at version 5.1 for a little while at least.

You know, as I was asking the question, I only just realised the ‘51’ joke, and I just realised what a stupid question it was the second it left my mouth.

God damn it, Chris!