How Stray Fawn Published a Game With Instinct3

TerraScape by Bitfall Studios has been co-published by Instinct3 and Stray Fawn. Philomena Schwab spoke to GamesMarkt about the collaboration with the German influencer agency and how the successful co-publishing project came about.

Even for Stray Fawn, with its extensive experience in publishing its own games and those of its partners, this collaboration with Instinct3 is something special - as Philomena Schwab, co-founder of Stray Fawn Studio, revealed in an interview after the successful launch of TerraScape.

Stray Fawn Studio is doing very well anyway. The Wandering Village has sold over 200,000 copies and is still in Early Access, while the Dungeon Clawler demo was extremely successful at the recent Steam Next Fest. The game is scheduled for release in the fourth quarter of 2024. Three other titles are scheduled for release in the Publishing segment this year: Flotsam by Pajama Llama Games from Belgium, Airborne Empire by The Wandering Band from Canada and Earth of Oryn by the team of the same name from Belgium. Stray Fawn Publishing specialises in city-building strategy games.

GamesMarkt: To begin with: How did Stray Fawn Publishing and Instinct3 work together? How did you divide up the tasks?

Philomena Schwab: "It was an interesting setup, since both Instinct3 and Stray Fawn were publishing a game for the first time. Our studio had some experience publishing our own games, but never a project from a third party before. I was surprised how smoothly the communication and task division worked out. There wasn’t a clear division of tasks, we mostly both did what we could to push the game and communicated with each other daily to make sure we got everything covered."

GamesMarkt: Are you happy with the TerraScape launch?

Philomena Schwab: Very happy, the launch heavily exceeded our expectations. Since this was our first launch as a publisher, we were quite nervous about whether we could do the game justice with our marketing efforts.

GamesMarkt: How did the collaboration with Instinct3 come about? And what did you hope to achieve, given that you were entering uncharted territory, after all, Instinct3 as an agency virtually provides access to influencers?

Philomena Schwab: We have Bitfall Studios to thank for this collaboration. They had been in touch with Instinct3 before and pitched us the idea to team up and co-publish the game. We didn’t really know what to expect, but as a new publisher we are always happy to try out different things and see what works.

GamesMarkt: TerraScape started in Early Access with another publisher, Toplitz. Can you tell us when, how and why you took over the project?

Philomena Schwab: A few months ago, we started talking to folks at Bitfall Studios in a casual manner, mostly trying to help them out with some marketing questions they had. They then showed interest in our newly founded publisher, and we partnered up. We have no connection to the previous publishing deal.

GamesMarkt: Is a co-publishing model, especially with an agency that specialises in influencers, a model that could be of interest to you in the future?

Philomena Schwab: Yes, I believe this way of working has great potential! I think co-publishing in general is super interesting because you keep learning new things from each other, so we would definitely do it again :)

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