Dieter Schoeller: "Headup might have been a little bit too quirky for Thunderful"

Earlier this year, Thunderful sold Headup for €500,000 – three years after acquiring the German-based developer and publisher.

While the sale of Headup was part of Thunderful's restructuring programme announced back in January, founder and CEO Dieter Schoeller tells GamesIndustry.biz the decision was also down to a change in the company's priorities.

"Thunderful went in a different direction over the years, building up another publishing department in the UK," he says when we meet at Devcom in Cologne. "So we ended up having a strategy of potentially two labels, me being on the indie side and the core business being more on the British side for the bigger productions," he says.

During this time, there was a constant change in leadership at Thunderful and "a lot of strategy shifting in between." Schoeller also moved positions a fair bit, going from VP of publishing to VP of production which led him to dabble in a lot of prototyping "which became quite quirky", he laughs.

"I think Headup might have been a little bit too quirky for a bigger, larger corporation which tries to streamline its operations."

Discussions for Headup to leave Thunderful took about seven months, and Schoeller says they parted ways on good terms.

"I still own roughly 1% of Thunderful and I'm good friends with the whole team, so we didn't part on bad terms – they just had to focus on their strategy" he explains. "There were several options of either closing down, finding another buyer, or selling it back to me. I think I made an offer which was acceptable."

As for what the situation is like without Thunderful's resources, Schoeller says that Headup isn't struggling. In fact, earlier this week it spun off its development studio Goon Squad and has a number of projects in the pipeline including racing game Screw Drivers which is currently in early access.

"It's a different scale. We sold Headup roughly a decade after we founded it. The reason why I sold it wasn't because we're not profitable or anything – it was a seller's market, so prices were good."

For Schoeller, it was all about focusing on his team's needs and what he could provide for them to thrive.

"I thought maybe my team would become bored of indie budgets," he explains. "I was afraid that quality people might leave, so I thought this would be the right next step for the team to really get onto bigger budgets and show their talent while working on bigger productions. Though, we found that in the end, it's not necessarily more enjoyable.

"Actually, a small title with a small team can be way more enjoyable to work with than a big team, where you have to sustain a big production pipeline because the screws are a little bit looser if you go indie."

Schoeller added: "It's more enjoyable to work with passionate people on the grassroots level because there's so much love still for the medium with not much of a business model behind it. We try to add the knowledge of marketability to them and help them find their way in, but with a focus on putting passionate developers in the spotlight.

"And I don't want Headup to be in the spotlight. I'd rather have a studio and the title its team creates at the forefront, sit in the background and just enjoy it to enable them to get their work in front of an audience."