Secret Stash Ep 6: How Hellhades turned their gaming community into a $6M studio

Most games would kill for a community like Plarium’s RAID: Shadow Legends - and the team behind Hellhades has a lot to do with that. What started out as a hobby YouTube channel, is now a massive community with more than 225,000 followers as well as the go-to website for RAID news, guides, and interactive tools. Recently, the Hellhades team decided to turn the world of game development - they founded the studio Fateless and in 10 quick weeks raised $6M from the community. 

In this episode of Secret Stash, hosts Archie Stonehill and Justin Kan sit down with the Fateless team - Simon Lockerby, Sham Saleh, and Dan Francis - and discuss: 

• The origins of HellHades and its growth into a massive community hub
• How a YouTube channel turned into a game studio with a $6M raise
• Strategies for building passionate gaming communities
• How direct-to-consumer is reshaping community building

Tune into the latest episode below or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or, keep reading for the highlights.

The origins of Hellhades

3:49 - “I  found this game RAID, which kind of helped me pass the time. I was like, ‘there's just no one doing any good content on this game. So I'm going to start doing a few YouTube videos as a hobby.’ And then after like two, three months, basically my views just went up and I was like, this could actually be my job.”

“It was just really trying to cement myself as the person someone finds when they try and search for RAID: Shadow Legends.”

Be conscious about community from the start

Simon, 9:37 - “ I was really conscious right from the start around building community. I set up a Discord almost within the first couple of weeks of doing content because I thought basically what I was strong at before I was a content creator was being in these clans. People would come to me with questions or can you help me with this?”

Simon, 10:32 - “I had this tier list where people could go and find how good different champions in RAID were. It was a Google sheet that I kept up to date and new characters would come in, and I’d fill in the ratings …  This is my experience of these different heroes in the game, and I was like, right, this is what I think. But it had a lot of traction because I had 500 to 600 people. And then when I'm streaming pretty much, the questions are constantly, ‘ah, what do you think of this, this character? What, what would you do with this character?’”

“Dan, who ended up being my co-founder of HH Gaming, just pitched me an idea. He's like, ‘look, why don't you broaden your platforms? You should have a Twitter presence. You should have all the socials basically, and you should do a game website.” 

“ So first it was just like, ‘how do we become the go-to site for anyone who wants information about RAID? What's missing here? Really then we start to spitball ideas. For me, I was like, ‘well, what's missing that I can go and get information, but how do you actually help me to improve my experience in this game?’ And, and that's really where I think the magic came from. Because it was like, let's spitball different ideas around what's the value add beyond just a game landing page.” 

Archie, 12:58 - “ I don't know if you realize it but like that is why so much of Stash comes from like my experience with RAID. Because it is a game that really benefits from the community it built, and particularly your website …  Like what we do at Stash is help developers think about what exactly you're describing. Like, how do you create out-of-gameplay products, experiences, engagement tools that make the gameplay experience better, which your site definitely does for RAID.  If I want to know which champion I'm going to upgrade, I have to look them up. Like, this champion is a 3, but you're ranking on Hydra is a 5 and I get a good Hydra champion. Like that's nuanced. It takes a lot of deep understanding of the game.” 

Community building is all about the value-add

Simon, 14:02 - “ I would really look for that value add. We were looking at what type of tools can we build to really help players understand the game better, get a better experience whilst they're playing.” 

“ We stumbled across a developer who developed this bit of code on GitHub, which was optimizing gear for characters in the game. So it literally looked at a character and said, you should put these pieces on to get the best experience from this character. It was used by about 80 people and it was basically used by people that understood code. I saw this piece of software, and I was scared to download it. And even if I download it, I was like, should I open this file or not? Like this is properly scary to open this file.”

“ And I was like, how do we make this feasible for a normal person? How do we make it really user friendly? And that's my type of vibe. I can't put this out as it is right now, because it just doesn't work. It's too niched. So we started to workshop ideas around opening that out to make it visually appealing, a great UI on the front, as easy to use as possible, even though it's quite a complicated tool. Then over time we then iterate on that, absorbing feedback from a community and then finally - what are the nuggets that are really useful? What pieces can we actually use? So we built this software on this tool again and again, to the point where it's like constant additional value add.”

Simon, 21:39 - “ It's been around for ages. All of the big games really have some fuller platform, which you go to outside of the game to enhance your experience. We were like, how do we bring that into this space? And, what does it look like in this space?”

Integrating creators into the game team

Sham, 16:05 - “ Coming at it from my perspective, who's not a content creator, from my background of indie development - collaborating directly with a content creator who understands and is in the space that you are targeting, that you're excited about, that you're building on, I don't think there's any better way to have a pulse on the beat of what's happening.”

“It's not just like, ‘oh, you should partner with them and have them talk about your game and say how sweet it is and stuff like that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a direct connection, someone who's integrated into the team.”

“I think a lot of companies are probably coming at it from the perspective of, ‘oh, we've heard that, that content creators are great. So we should bring them in and have them talk about our product.’ Yeah, that's not the point.”

The rise of direct-to-consumer in games

Archie, 26:01 - “ You're looking at Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo 4, Tears of the Kingdom - it was extraordinary. And yet, console sales grew by 0.3% according to Newzoo. So like what the hell is that about, right? Fundamentally as a VC, I've been looking at games and being like, I don't think product innovation and improvement can actually grow your game anymore. You're seeing so many people do really cool things with games, and seeing no uplift to the industry. So I was always looking at distribution innovations and direct-to-consumer is like the biggest one, this is the holy of holies.” 

“Playtika has done D2C, there's a lot more first-party launcher movement in like Riot and Epic. The big guys were kind of quietly doing this, there was a regulatory unlock, but I didn't think anyone in the space was kind of doing it right. So that's when we connected and I was like, this is how I think it needs to be done to succeed - which is like highly bespoke, incredibly invested in the expertise around direct to consumer. And a lot of that was inspired by my own experiences with games and how experiences outside of the game play had made that game work for me.”

“In some ways, like this is a story that has happened in every industry you've seen. Distribution innovations happen at a certain point in maturity. Like ecommerce, airline sales, hotels - you don't have travel agents anymore. They go direct-to-consumer. But to do that, they need to build loyalty programs, all this stuff that benefits them. Direct-to-consumer ecommerce comes with a bunch of sales strategies and custom products.”

“Similarly, regulatory action has really disrupted distribution systems before. You look at a lot of the standard oil, even regulations were about control of the railways. The big thing Rockefeller did that was monopolistic was he was basically cutting really dodgy deals with the railways to massively decrease his cost of buying it. The regulators were like, ‘you can't do that anymore.’ So, this is kind of an old story. It just looks really weird in games, because games are weird products where you sell digital things, and they're also an industry where this has never happened before, because the console system of distribution always intermediates the developer.” 

When does direct-to-consumer make sense for games?

Archie, 31:34 - “You need revenue for direct-to-consumer to matter.  You need to build a game and get users. Having said that, I think there are use cases earlier on - like you guys and we could talk a bit about this. So if you have other ways to acquire your audience, I think you can build from the start like a really good distribution channel. Our value proposition is really interesting, probably up to pre-release, then there's a period of scaling where we're less important and then in maturity, it's interesting again.”

“In pre-release, it’s like how do you tailor a first-party launcher to beta testing or early community access. If you look at a game like SUPERVIVE, which is a Theorycraft game, they did all that beta testing through a first party launcher. They then launched on Steam. I wouldn't be surprised over time if they succeed on Steam, they'll switch back to a first-party launcher, like Riot did.”

Community first, game second

Simon, 32:32 - “ The community were like, ‘look, you understand this space so well, why don't you create a game that we actually want to play?’ So Dan and I, we kind of laughed it off a number of times. And I remember at the meetup with the HH Gaming guys, I was like, ‘why don't we just build this game?’ And no one said anything. We didn't get the kind of laughter. It's like, why are we not just doing this? Like there's so many people that trust what we already do and we've got the expertise in terms of knowledge of a genre. But we're like, so if we're going to do it, we need someone that's got game experience and game building experience: Sham.” 

Sham, 33:28 - “ I was making a game called Incarnate, and I was like, ‘I feel like this is something that you would dig.’ So I just reached out.”

Simon, 34:14 - “So we set up Fateless together and scoped out, well, what would it need to create a game in this space? And it went on a raise. We actually were able to raise $6M in like a 10 week period from angel investors within the community. So it's so much trust in what we were going to deliver. They were just like, how do we get involved? Then from there we've been able to build out our studio. We're now about 10 months from the launch of our first title.”

Incorporating community into game design

Simon, 35:04 - “ We've got a really active Discord where any idea we will listen to and some of them we will take on. I share the good ones in my opinion with our design team - now, can we make that happen or not? Or can we iterate on it? We will have a weekly round table where we bring ideas forward and it's like, what can we actually do with this to make it work within our game cycle?” 

“But for us, what's really important is actually sharing the development of the game with our community. So they stay involved from this point of you telling us you want this to actual launch. We'll do a weekly video on our YouTube channel where it might be, this is how a 3D character is actually made. We show that end to end process. We show how they're animated. We show how we do a VFX. Pretty much all of the behind the scenes stuff. As someone that actually enjoys the artistic process of this type of stuff, I was like, if I'm going to dig this, maybe other people will dig it as well. It's actually worked out really well. 

We're not on Steam, but the equivalent of a wishlist, people signed up as beta testers ready to go with a much wider audience already kind of looking to play the game. I don't know if there's many even big studios that would say, we've got as hungry an audience ready for a product as what we've got.”

Archie, 36:40 - “Most studios you see, you think they have a good game and you need to find a community for it, whereas you have a community and now you need to build a good game.” 

Simon, 36:47 - “ That was our experience at GDC talking to other kind of startups or indie studios. So then what challenges do you have? And pretty much it was, ‘we don't have any money and we're constantly month to month trying to find a way to function.’ But then even people that develop their game, it's like, we don't have a team, we've not thought about that yet.’ You know, there's just no community growth at all. So we think it's actually a really good model to have. As long as it's an influencer or creator that deeply loves the project and is involved in the project, then just bringing the community along for the ride is fantastic.”

Having the guts to pivot and give your community what they want

Simon, 38:41 - “ It's having the guts to pivot hard. We had a combat system, which we loved, but it was too strategically deep. It was more a tactical than a strategic sort of game. And it got to the point where we're like, ‘are we even now developing the game that our audience wants?’ We had probably a two week inflection period, where we needed to change our combat systems completely. You've got to put a lot of work and energy into it, and a couple of our USPs were kind of built around this system and you're like, ‘we're going to change it anyway, because we don't think it's right.’ Unless you've got the courage to do that as a group and as a leadership team, then you're going to fail.” 

The ideal Fateless game launcher

Archie, 39:29 - “ So we're developing your game launcher with you. Right now, it distributes games, which is good. But now we get to collaborate on the fun part, right, and the important part. Drawing on your experience at HellHades, what do you think are some of the most effective and interesting things you can build into the launcher, especially in the early stage of your game.?”

Sham, 40:12 - “ A direct discord integration - so we can connect directly the community and keep them engaged while they're in the store. They're not interacting with any of their friends. But if you can keep that going, that's amazing … These games are inherently social.”

Simon, 41:20 - “ Things like events that are coming up. That people get excited about ahead of time. So always having your experience of, okay, this is a web store, but it's also somewhere where I can just come and get news information. I've got a loyalty program there, which I'm excited by. There might be some updates on those things kind of happening on a regular basis.”

“But one of the things which I'm really keen about is having a content creator environment in that same space. So a bit like what Supercell does really with their kind of great creator program. They get perks. If I watch a creator and I wanna support that creator in the store, then I'm gonna put a code in and that creator gets a percentage or whatever so that they benefit from that as well. If you don't have good creators constantly following your product, then you lose a lot of the engagement from the players that can't just progress. Then when you go to launch game two, that system is already working really well and all of a sudden you've got this group of creators who will be like, ‘of course, I'm gonna play game two because I got this great system.’ You just get this massive wave of organic traffic on the internet, which is why Supercell doesn’t pay creators. They don't pay influencers. They do it indirectly for this kind of organic tool they've built. And suddenly they drop Squad Busters and they've got like 40 million downloads day one. That's the dream, utilizing these types of tools. Not just for the player, but that player-creator relationship as well.”

Simon, 43:18 - “ Players inevitably are going to churn out and they're going to find something else to do, or they lose interest for a period of time. The fact that we will have a direct way to communicate with them and say, ‘oh, massive update coming in this month, we've got the 12 labors of Hercules coming in, a really exciting new event, with these new features.’ And actually being able to directly communicate with our consumers, our players, and explain why they should come back to the game. It's way more effective than just hoping they find a random email … If you can actually just go directly to that player and say, ‘by the way, did you know this is what we're doing?’ And hopefully get a load of that re engagement.”