A Sproing in the Step
The Austrian developer's CEO Harald Riegler talks business development, motivation of staff and censorship in Germany
Sproing is an independent developer in Austria that's known best for its work-for-hire capabilities, most recently having contributed significantly to the Koch Media title Cursed Mountain.
Here, the company's CEO Harald Riegler explains how the business has been built over the past nine years, how it's kept a stable employee base, and why he's uncomfortable with censorship in Germany.
Well, we're a console game developer, that's what we're really focused on. We've shipped a lot of games over the years, and become one of the best work-for-hire developers in Central Europe over the last couple of years.
I think what really differentiates us from other companies is that we have a really strong focus on our process stuff, so reliability and shipping quality games on time is something we've focused on.
Because of the surroundings where we come from, we started out working with a lot of smaller publishers, and we've been described as a company that always has a constant amount of staff on the payroll - and the way that we manage that is that we have multiple projects, and we shift people between teams.
That's worked really well for us because the Central European development scene is pretty volatile, publishers come and go, and we've survived with constant growth and profitability over nine years now.
Most of the time - we have some original IP as well, but the core focus of the company is clearly work-for-hire. But we've come to a level with some of our clients where they'll send us a quarter of a page saying what they want, we spec it out and then we develop the whole thing.
So it's actually become pretty rewarding, where you get more freedom, more trust.
Well, when we first started we didn't really outsource anything, but over the years I've found that it helps enormously to properly manage your partners and your outsourcing. I think it's about the management of the processes, it's about choosing the partners that you really want to work with, and not go for the cheapest thing that blows up in your face.
No, not at all - and that's a key point. It's not about saving man-months, it's about using man-months in the best possible way to get your game finished. We ship three to four titles per year, and we do that with 50 people on staff. We couldn't do that if we weren't properly managing our outsourcing.
Also, it's been extremely valuable to work as part of the production of Cursed Mountain where we are part of the outsourcing - you're on the receiving end and you suddenly see what piece works, what piece doesn't work, and you can then adapt that process to something that does work. That's just a great experience.
If you look at what happened to Grin, that's a great example of how careful you need to be when you scale. Also, it's a motivational factor - we have almost zero fluctuation in the team, because everybody can rely on the fact that we only grow in a way that's sustainable, and we don't inflate our team for a production, or for a project, but we outsource things... and if it's just too much, we say no and don't do it.
What that does is gives you an incredible amount of dedication to the company - an incredible amount of know-how increase that you don't lose. People are faithful to the company, they know that if they work in a games company that's been stable for nine years, that's really something that they value. You get great results from that.