Dino Patti made a name for himself as the co-founder of Playdead – the studio behind indie classics Limbo and Inside – with Arnt Jensen back in 2006. But Patty left the company in 2016, shortly after the release of Inside, and has since focused his efforts on Consistencya tool that allows small developers to easily implement multiplayer games and flexibly scale (or scale down) the back-end server architecture.
Coherence recently celebrated the launch of version 2.0, as well as the acquisition of Roundtable Interactive Group (backed by investor EMK Capital). Now in an exclusive interview with the magazine GamesIndustry.bizPatti reflects on the evolution and future of Coherence, as well as her long-running legal battle with Playdead's Jensen.
On the sale of Coherence to Roundtable (whose portfolio includes GameMill Entertainment), Explicit gamesAnd Auroch Digitaland the last one was recently acquired from Tencent-owned Sumo Digital), Patty says this shouldn't come as a surprise. “When you start all this and start accepting venture capital investments, that inevitably becomes the end goal. I don't think many people realize this. So for us, the whole path led to something like this.
“I didn’t start Coherence for myself. It was about getting a lot of great people around a great mission and then they would take flight. And when this opportunity came up, I thought this was exactly what we were looking for. […] They understand our vision, they want to advance our vision, they have several companies that can help bring that vision to life.”
Patti is satisfied that Roundtable offers what is needed. “They didn't buy us to take the technology and dismantle it,” he says, adding that if the buyer were a giant like Google or Amazon, there was a risk that Coherence's technology would simply be gobbled up.
The technology has found its way into more and more games in the seven years since Coherence was founded, mainly because it makes it relatively easy to add multiplayer to games that weren't designed with multiplayer capabilities to begin with. The company has just announced a new partnership with Poncle to bring multiplayer to Vampire Survivors. Patti says the team working on the game “didn't know anything about multiplayer, didn't want to deal with it, and we just […] made it possible. So it was a match made in heaven.”
The 2.0 update brings hosting flexibility, allowing teams to choose between cloud hosting, client hosting and self-hosting, as well as new pricing Structure: Coherence development tools are free for studios under $200K in revenue, and the Pro tier offers a flat fee of $1,000 per month for larger studios. Hosting costMeanwhile, scale up and down depending on the number of monthly active users. Patti notes that Coherence now has “deep integration” with Unity, allowing developers to get started in minutes.
According to Patti, Coherence's key target audience is single-player games, where “you see the game can just as easily be played with a friend, and we help them make it multiplayer.” He adds that Coherence follows in the footsteps of Unity's creation, giving small developers the opportunity to play with the tools without any upfront costs. “I like this philosophy: if someone has an idea, they don’t have to be part of a team where there are networking programs and so on. They just have to be able to bring the idea to life. I think that's how we get the best and most creative ideas. And if you look at all the games today, a lot of them started with Unity.”
But he believes there's still a lot to be done with multiplayer. “I love single-player games, I love how emotional they are, and I think the multiplayer space hasn't been explored in that way.” He adds that Coherence wants to support the new crop of low-quality co-op games we've seen recently, like RV There Yet? “How can we make this even easier? This is a great inspiration.”
Life after server shutdown
Coherence's flexibility in terms of hosting could be a big help for smaller studios experimenting with multiplayer gaming. “They could start with a peer-to-peer network. If they're really successful, they can create servers, and when the game's popularity wanes, they can move back to peer-to-peer.” The last point regarding the reduction of server support partially coincides with Stop the Killing Games movement and its demands to preserve online services or put them in the hands of players rather than abandon older games entirely. “Every time I see a video about it, I say, 'This is what we want to solve,'” says Patti (who, however, notes that she is not involved in Stop Killing Games).
“You can't force Ubisoft to invest money in something for which they pay more for the service than the community brings in. But you can solve this problem with the help of technology, allowing these games to always work. So perhaps large servers with hundreds [of players] are not available, but at least four players can play on the server. This is what we provide and I would like to fix it.
“I don’t want to lose trust in digital products. I'm a big believer in games, and when I buy something for my Steam catalog, even if I don't fully know who owns it, I expect to always be able to play it until the end of time. I bought The Crew and she malfunction before I even played it. I don't want to lose faith that I can't just buy games anymore.”
From a business perspective, he says he understands that at some point the costs of servers will eventually outweigh the revenue from a game with a shrinking player base. “But it’s easy for us to just go back to peer-to-peer. You will lose a little bit of network quality, but for most people it won't matter.” He adds that another option would be for players to pay their own server hosting fees, like they do in Minecraft. “There’s something about that flexibility and freedom. I think every game developer needs to think [about it]”
It's a tough battle
Patti says that as a game developer, he knows all the problems that can arise when turning a single-player game into a multiplayer one. “Most people say, yeah, you can't do that. And then we get the source code, and for two or three weeks we play their game with them and say, 'Da-da!'” It's at this point, he says, that developers begin to see opportunities, not just problems. “Once you try it and you're out in the world and playing together, you change the thought to, 'Hey, how do we solve this problem?'”
Coherence typically charges a fee to build multi-user prototypes like these. “But for some people,” Patti says, “if it’s a high-end game, we also offer to make it for less money. And to do this is just a magical moment.”
But even so, it was difficult to convince people of the magical properties of Coherence. “It's an uphill battle,” laments Patti, noting that developers don't tend to truly realize the possibilities and potential until they actually see their own game running on the SDK. Again, he compares this to Unity and the difficulty the firm had in convincing people in the early days. “Me and other developers said, “Hey, but we have our own engine. Why should we use yours? […] Then you fast forward 15 years and you don’t have that question anymore.”
For Patti, selling people the transformative power of Coherence is a personal crusade. “I made it for developers,” he says, explaining how it all started with his own development difficulties. “I started thinking about making a multiplayer game and was trying to find technology that I could easily test and try things with, and I just felt like everything around me was just getting in the way of that. So it became a weird side quest for me.”
He's also mindful of the service's legacy, noting that in some specific contracts they have agreements that developers can continue to use the code and services if Coherence goes away for some reason. “This is important to me because trust is one of the most important things. When people make games, they spend anywhere from two to five years of their lives, plus they sacrifice a lot of other things. […] You don't want to base your technology on something you can't trust. So trust is just a huge thing in the developer community. And the reason Unity has lost a lot of customers lately is because what they did with Runtimeand people realized that they cannot always be our friends.”
Patty has publicly stated that he has “no plans to leave anytime soon” now that Coherence has been sold, but he longs for his old days of game development. “I miss this. I really miss it.” Looking back, he admits he went into creating Coherence naively, thinking he could do it in two or three years. But the reality was very different: not least in terms of raising money, which meant dealing with a completely different group of investors than he was used to in game development, people who “didn't know what I had done or who I was.”
Seven years is a long time to go without game development, especially after creating one of the most critically acclaimed and influential indie games of all time. “I really miss making games,” Patty sighs. “You work with a lot of talented people, put your head down and just concentrate. When you develop, it's not about fame, it's just about a good quality product. I really, really like this environment.”
Patty's eyes light up when he starts talking about old times. Maybe it's finally time to return to game development? “Let's see. It would be fun. The plan, of course, is to make games at some point. But when will this moment come? That's the real question.”
Limbaugh legal
Not that the old days were golden. WITH their acrimonious split in 2016Patty was embroiled in legal battles with Playdead co-founder Arnt Jensen.
“It is what it is,” shrugs Patti, who says they recently had a failed arbitration attempt. “So now we meet in court next November. I don't know what this is all about. I think he's still very resentful about a lot of things and now he's trying to harass me.”
The latest controversy was over Patty. sharing images related to Limbo development on social networks. “In Denmark we don’t have the same fair use principle as in other countries. He suddenly had one legitimate thing he could go after me for. [with]and that's what he decided to do. I don't understand the reasons and I think it's very stupid, but I also feel like I need to follow through with this. I really like to stand up for what I do and I feel like I spend a lot of money on it and I'm going to spend even more just to fight it.”
He knows the press will be delighted when the trial begins. “I filed a lot of things in court about that period and how he tried to take over the company in crazy ways. And if we go through with the trial, you guys will be very interested in figuring all this out.”
But Patti believes that airing the grievances publicly will be worth the effort to set the record straight. “He is very aggressive in trying to write me out of Playdead history. He took me off his credit rolls, he disputes that I was a co-founder, he writes all sorts of nonsense about me… And this is what I want to fight and prove. And that’s why I continue this even though it’s stupid.”
