Open Emotion: The Irish studio that survived and thrived during the PSN crisis

The disastrous PSN hack may have hurt plenty of video game developers, but Limerick's Open Emotion Studios have turned the crisis on its head and are ready to expand.

By Emmet Purcell

In the video games industry, two months can seem like an eternity. When we last spoke to Limerick-based developers Open Emotion Studios, the team had launched puzzle title Mad Blocker Alpha and were prepping a May launch for their portmanteau-titled high-speed action game Ninjamurai. How things change.

After the largest data theft in video game history grounded Open Emotion’s main distribution channel, the Playstation Network (PSN) for a month, delaying Ninjamurai's imminent release, we weren’t sure what to expect when we got in touch with company CEO Paddy Murphy.

Would Paddy now be a broken shell of a man, flipping burgers part-time to keep the lights on at the hugely talented company following the PSN ordeal?

On the contrary, it turns out that Open Emotion have been busy enjoying an unforeseen benefit to the outage, are creating a sequel to a game that’s not yet released and most impressive of all, are readying moves for an Eastern expansion.

JOE: Paddy, when we last talked you had released Mad Blocker Alpha and were getting ready to release Ninjamurai in May.

We all know what happened next but can you tell us what was the PSN outage like for you as a studio? We’ve read so much on how the attack affected the big studios but what about indie developers, particularly Irish developers such as yourself, considering that the platform is the main distribution model for the company?

PM: Well, yeah it’s [PSN] pretty much our only source of income. To be honest, a lot of companies got bent out of shape about it but we had to understand it - with so many people’s data at risk, we knew that they’d have it back up and ready.

One thing that we did want from Sony was extra promotion for our titles once it did come back up, which is what they said they would deliver for us. We’re still waiting on that but we understand that they’ve got to catch up with a lot of other stuff first.

What we’ve been told is that we should see Playstation Plus promotion [Sony’s paid membership model, currently offered as a free trial] for our Minis [mini downloadable titles for comparatively miniature prices] in July and August, maybe September even. As much extra promotion as possible.

JOE: How long was it before you realised that the PSN outage wasn’t going to be just a few days long, and that this was something that would go on for a few more weeks? Did you get any advance notice?

PM: Not really, everyone was in the same boat. I was in the same boat as a consumer and developer. I suppose it was a bit annoying when there was a bit of staggering at first, “Oh, it’ll be back around three days… around five days”.

When it got to the point where we were told that it wouldn’t be back until the end of May I actually appreciated it a lot more. At least then we knew we had an actual date to work towards. I think once the worst was confirmed we said to each other, “Alright, let’s not bank on having Ninjamurai out in May and give it a bit of extra time.”

JOE: You really didn’t wait too long though for Ninjamurai, launching the game on June 8. How has the market been since the service returned – is it clogged with developers like yourselves that had products ready to ship within the original timeframe?

PM: Probably, there was a lot of big titles originally, such as Beyond Good and Evil HD and a good few very prominent titles that came out around the same time.

Ninjamurai features Canabalt-style frantic gameplay and a coughy protagonist

When Mad Blocker Alpha launched in the US though, it was the day that the PSN went down – it was only up around seven hours. However, the good thing to come out of that was a special Playstation Plus offer that existed for US users, so what worked really well to our benefit was that when PSN came back up, everyone had a Playstation Plus account for a month [as was available to all, not just subscribers following the PSN’s return as an apology of sorts].

JOE: And so everyone wanted to buy something right away, wanted something new…

PM: Exactly. When you buy something at a reduced cost on PSN, you get to keep it, so I think a lot of people felt compelled to buy it while it was cheap, while they had a Plus account. Sales figures from there have been incredibly positive.

JOE: So I suppose you’re possibly one of the few people that are actually benefiting from the whole outage?

PM: [Laughs] I suppose. I got asked to give my take on the whole PSN outage at the time and I said my piece about how I felt Sony did the right thing and how we were looking for a bit of extra promotion and I think that circulated around the web and built up a lot of extra awareness for Mad Blocker Alpha once it came back up.

JOE: True, I suppose that Mad Blocker Alpha is the premiere title at the studio, but I was wondering how sales have been in the two weeks since Ninjamurai’s launch?

PM: Ninjamurai’s being doing well in terms of press scores and things like that. It was a scary one for us because we used it as a cross between a Mini and a Playstation Network and we were worried if people would see it as either a rubbish PSN title or a really great Mini.

We didn’t know who would seek that niche but the reponse has been great. People have been really positive and everyone’s been telling us that it’s way beyond… it’s not really a Mini. It was a huge project for us and we crammed it into four months and it keep growing throughout development but right now we just like feel “wow”, it got done and it’s got everything that we wanted to put into it.

JOE: It definitely sounds as though you’ve came out of the other side a lot stronger following the entire PSN ordeal, so what does the future hold? I’ve noticed that you’re working on an upcoming title, Revoltin’ Youth and would I be right in thinking that there’s already a sequel planned?

PM: Revoltin’ Youth was something that I’ve been sitting on for a number of years. We said that we’d make something a little small between Ninjamurai and whatever we did next and it’ll be fun and easy to make but now it’s really grown so fast and a lot of people are showing a lot of interest.

I think the reason is that it’s a game type where there isn’t a lot of it anymore - it’s in the vein of The Lost Vikings - so you have three characters and each of them has different abilities. There isn’t a lot of games like that anymore and I think people that enjoyed them are really interested in this. We’ve also got a proper marketing campaign behind it too, which is something we haven’t had for our previous titles.

We were messing around while making Revolin’ Youth recently and one of the characters slipped down the game in between layers and the way that it happened made it look like he was on top of the scenery, kind of like the old beat-em-ups. We were thinking “that works so well, we could do a Streets of Rage-style beat-em-up…”

JOE: Can we expect a roast chicken power-up?

PM: Definitely, there has to be. You could smash a bin and grab a roast chicken. We put it on the backburner but then some lads that are doing a project called Winnitron, Ray Quinn and Kieran Murray, they got onto me about an arcade cabinet project. They said that the cabinet would be networked up to other cabinets all over the world and that they’d love us to make a game for it. Straight away, without even thinking about it, I was like “that Revoltin’ Youth thing that we were joking about… that would be perfect.”

Sound advice when confronted by a horned dragon serpent thingy

At the moment we’re only playing on doing it for that, it’s not even something commercial but it’s something to get the name out there and do some more with the characters. But I suppose depending on how well it came off and things like that, we might look at making it a Mini or if we can move up onto the ranks, perhaps PSN or XBLA [Xbox Live Arcade].

JOE: So when is the original… the original, it’s not even out [Laughs}, the first Revoltin Youth’ coming out?

PM: [Laughs] It’s looking like it’ll be early August. I don’t have a concrete release date but one thing we’re trying to do this time is to hold back on the European release date and try get them both out in the two regions at the same time.

JOE: So just before we go, do you have any possible plans for expansion for Open Emotion, especially because it really sounds as though things are going your way?

PM: Things are looking up in a lot of ways. We got some external funding from Enterprise Ireland since the last time we [Open Emotion and JOE] spoke, so that’s given us a chance to focus on our project instead of making small games to churn out some cash.

So now we can step back and look at what we can make on a bigger platform. So we’re going over to London next week to talk to publishers like Sony, Nintendo, Atari, Microsoft about IPs that we have and try to get onto PSN and XBLA, because that’s really where we want to be.

Our other big news is that we’ve partnered up with a company in Japan called Tabot, who have done outsourcing for games in years. They don’t do any IP creation, so we’re handling that sort of things, so we’re actually going to be setting up an extra office in Japan come October of this year. So it’ll be Open Emotion Studios Tokyo.

JOE: That must be crazy, going from Limerick to Tokyo in just a few years.

PM: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s nuts but we figure that it’s so far apart, the West and East…

JOE: I’m sure they’re big fans of Ninjamurai, though?

PM: Yeah, we’ve gotten great responses about that out there. The goal is to really close that gap so that we can keep in contact with people in the East as much as possible because given how far apart we are, it’s still ridiculously vital to be involved with that area in the video games industry. So that’s the plan at the moment.

JOE: Well it certainly all sounds very exciting. Thanks for your time today Paddy, we really appreciate it.

PM: No problem.

We first spoke to Open Emotion Studios in an earlier piece this year, which you can find at this link. The studio's Ninjamurai is currently available on PSN and will be featured in a future JOE review.