Reply Games: We want to be the Italian PlatinumGames

09.08.2023 - 11:35 / gamesindustry.biz

Reply Games is a studio that's a small part of one of Italy's biggest corporations.

Reply Group provides all sorts of B2B digital services for all sorts of industries, from energy to banking and telecoms to healthcare. It generates billions of euros in revenue and boasts over 10,000 employees.

The group's clients were looking to develop B2B experiences, particularly around VR and AR, and so Reply hired game developers to make some. Over time, this group split into two. One group – Infinity Reply – still creates those sorts of B2B experiences for clients. And the other became Reply Games, a consumer-facing developer behind the 2022 action game Soulstice.

"Soulstice was a pretty big endeavour for us," says Samuele Perseo, product manager at Reply Games.

"It took four years and nine months in total. We launched in September 2022, then we did multiple patches until the end of the year, tuning, quality of life and stuff like that. Then a couple of weeks ago we released the game on PS4. Originally it was PS5, PC and Xbox Series X and S, but we wanted to reach the PlayStation 4 audience."

The PS4 release coincided with the game going into the PlayStation Plus subscription service (namely the Extra and Premium tiers). And this has helped the game find a much larger audience on all platforms.

"The launch was hard because it's a very classic business model," Perseo tells us.

"Your product does not exist and then suddenly it's day one and you have to accrue your sales in that first window. But when we released on PS4, we were added into PlayStation Plus, which was nine months after the original launch, and it was a nice bump that also helped things on other platforms. We noticed on PC that there was renewed interest because obviously when these games are added to subscription, everyone talks about them.

"For us, this was important because it was not only about developing and releasing one single product; it's also about growing the team and building our reputation and position in the market."

"PlatinumGames have their signature style, they do things in-house, they do collaborations, and you can always see their style in there"

The core Reply Games team is around 30 people, but with contractors and outsource partners, more than 70 worked on Soulstice. Perseo describes the title as AA, and – as you can tell from the trailer – it was heavily inspired by Japanese action games like Bayonetta.

"Our role model is [Bayonetta developer] PlatinumGames because they have their signature style, they do things in-house, they do important collaborations, but every time they release something there's always a lot of interest, and you can always see their style in there," Perseo says. "We, humbly and crossing fingers