Dead Cells has become a household name among fans of the ever-growing roguelike genre and has enjoyed almost universal acclaim from critics and fans alike. Even in its unfinished Early Access state, the game managed to sell an impressive 700,000 copies. Dead Cells' tight controls, addicting die-and-try-again gameplay loop, and intriguing crossovers with other indie games like Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter have all contributed to its most recent milestone: a whopping 10 million copies sold.
Celebrating this massive victory, Evil Empire COO Benjamin Laulan held an interview with Game Rant to discuss the game's path to success. He spoke about why he felt the game resonated with so many players, how the game has changed over the years, and what the future holds for Dead Cells and its developers. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Dead Cells has sold an incredible 10 million copies since its inception. In your mind, what is it about the game that’s managed to captivate so many people?
Laulan: It is incredible, to be honest. It's kind of weird because we knew that we were going toward that number – because we know the sales numbers, obviously – and it's not like we sold two million in the past few weeks. So it’s not a surprise in that way. But achieving it is something really different. It's incredible. To answer your question, I think it's a lot of luck. But I want to say that it's also about our commitment to the game, and how much content we put into the game. I think now we're working on our 35th update of the game. We like to say that “we never left Early Access.” We keep on giving because the audience is here, the community is here.
I think if we can sum up the success of the game, it's thanks to our community. They're here for us, they want more, they're pushing us towards doing and creating more, whether it's content or it's purely creativity in new ways of playing the game, they allow us to keep doing it in some way. So it's kind of a virtuous circle where we are doing this for the community and the community is here to keep playing the game and they keep telling other people to buy the game. So the game keeps selling and that allows us, on our side, to afford a team that is fully focused on this.
Q: You mentioned the game is going on its 35th update. What do you feel have been some of the most significant changes over the years?
Laulan: I think the most significant changes were made during Early Access, where we've been really working on the core mechanics of the game. This was when the most significant changes were made. Later down the road, we killed the grind and made some additions to the storyline and the lore for the launch, which added some depth to the game that it didn't have before. One big addition was more recently with the Accessibility Update that we released during the year. That was really focused on giving the ability to most of the players to actually play the game and enjoy it the way they want or can. This was really well received.
I appreciated that update because I’m quite bad at Dead Cells. It’s nice that there are ways to adjust the experience to be more accessible.
Laulan: And that's fine. It's not like we really wanted to say to the audience, “Okay, we designed the game this way and the creative direction and vision for the game is this and this is the only way to play it.” If you want to play with helpers or modifiers, that's fine. It's not a bad thing, we want you to enjoy the game as well. It's not how we designed it in the first place, but we're not going to think less of you because you use the easy mode or some stuff like that.
We really wanted to put it in as many players' hands as possible, and it became intimidating when you look at the number of updates. It's becoming intimidating for newcomers to come into the game because the game is throwing so many things at you when you launch it for the first time, like the pop-ups everywhere for all the updates and DLCs that have been added. This is something we want to work on as well. The onboarding is important for newcomers because we've released 35 updates now, and that’s great, but we also want the game to be easily accessible for everyone who didn't follow the whole route of Dead Cells in the past few years.
Q: Dead Cells has had a number of crossovers with other indie games like Hollow Knight and Hyper Light Drifter. Could you talk about how you approach these crossovers? How do you decide which games to work with?
Laulan: A few indie friends had asked us in past years, “Hey, we're working on this game. Can we use some of the content in Dead Cells for our games?” Each time, we were looking at “Is this a great game quality-wise? Has it got some kind of an audience?” And if those checked out then we’d say, “Okay, sure, you can use Dead Cells in your game, we would be happy and humbled to loan you our Beheaded character or a weapon.”
And at some point, I was like, “Okay, we have a lot of indie friends. We love and respect a lot of those studios. Why shouldn't we do that for our audience?” And the plan at the beginning was to do that as Christmas presents because it was around Christmas time. So I just started to shoot emails to my contacts like, “Hey, dude, I'm a big fan of your game. We’re doing Dead Cells and we have this idea for an indie friends update and we would love to have your character and weapons from your game as well.” It went super nice. Having Hollow Knight in the game or Hotline Miami was one of my dreams, and we were like, “Can we have that in the game?” “Just send an email and we'll see what they say.” Sometimes it’s as easy as just asking, you know.
It’s a very unique thing about Dead Cells. The crossover items from other games have interesting mechanics and aren’t just reskins of existing Dead Cells gear.
Laulan: Yeah, we're never doing that. Even for the base game content. We'll never have the same sword just doing fire effects, then ice effects, and then poison effects. I know there’s been a lot of updates since the beginning, but we’re always committed to creativity before anything. Everything we do is because we have ideas, and we are excited about putting them into the game. So we apply that thinking to our crossovers as well.
I don't know if you've played the two updates – because we've had two "friends" updates in Dead Cells – but you can see the huge difference there is in terms of scope and content between the second one and the first one. Because in the second one, we were super crazy about the Lore Rooms that we added to the game. They got huge references to their own games and that's how you end up with a DeLorean in the game. The first one is a bit more shy and focuses more on the weapons. As indies, we are stronger together. When you have such big AAAs in front of you, I think it's important to stick together.
Q: Dead Cells features tons of weapons and mutations for people to discover. How do you decide what to include next? Are there certain goals you’re trying to achieve with each new addition?
Laulan: As I said, we're always driven by how creative we can be and how we can invent new interesting ways of playing the game. So it's not like creating skins and then changing the colors and that's it, you sell that for 15 bucks and you're done. That's really not the approach. We have a huge Christmas list of things that we want to implement into the game. So that's one way. The other one is the community because our developers are super close to the community on the Dead Cells Discord and on Reddit and we are listening to the ideas. If some of the ideas are awesome stuff in high demand, we can consider putting them into the game or not.
But also, I think it's part of the team. One of the biggest strengths of the team – which is an amazing team, by the way – is that we’re giving them the freedom to be super creative in that area. Usually, a game programmer is working with one of the artists, and they can iterate and create stuff that is prototyped really fast. So they can get wild and get some crazy ideas tested pretty quickly. We have the game designer of Dead Cells who is working on the big picture and the vision of an update or DLC, but afterward, GPPs (gameplay programmers) and artists can really go wild and offer their own ideas and bring them to the table. If it makes sense, even if it's crazy, we try to put it in the game and once it's validated by everyone, including Motion Twin, it can be implemented.
And that's how you end up with a Sharknado in the game. When you throw a shark into a tornado it creates a Sharknado.
Q: You’ve mentioned listening to the community a lot. Can you think of any interesting changes that were based on community feedback?
Laulan: One thing that we used to do is that in all of our patch notes, each time there is a thing that is added or modified thanks to the community, we added a small label saying that it was a community suggestion. This is our way to say “Okay, this is thanks to you guys. This fits into the game.” I think accessibility was one of those things as well. Also, the things that we did for Twitch integration. I think it was done in collaboration with the community as well. Viewers can take part in the game and annoy the player by throwing bombs and that kind of stuff.
I would like to give them credit for the ideas they gave us. You can't listen to every community suggestion though. You need to focus on the vision that you have for the game because you're still in charge of delivering that vision and that creative direction to the community. But it's a nice balance to have and they’ve got amazing ideas.
Q: According to the website, the name Evil Empire comes from a desire to do the opposite – standing against unethical practices in the industry and respecting players. How does that philosophy affect your approach to game development? Are there certain practices that you avoid?
Laulan: Yeah. For background, there were four co-founders of Evil Empire and three of us came from marketing, because we were the ones doing publishing and the whole campaign for the launch, and we were the public face of Motion Twin. So that's part of the joke behind Evil Empire because usually, marketing is seen as the bad side of things. So we wanted to own that and make fun of it through that name.
To answer your question, the first thing that comes to mind is crunch. We have a strict zero crunch policy at Evil Empire and that's something we really want to respect. If something needs to suffer from bad production management, that shouldn't be the humans. If we need to delay something because we poorly managed the production, we'll do it because we have to do it. There is no other solution. You can't ask a whole team to work double hours just to deliver on what you said you will. So that's the main thing.
And that links to the community and how transparent we try to be with them. We really learned that if you explain the reasons – if there was any fuckup you might have done or any delay that you can have – in a real transparent and human way, usually they’ll understand that you're just a team of humans. There are mistakes sometimes, and that's okay as long as you don't bullshit them. Sometimes we had some delays with updates, or issues with certifications on consoles and had to say, “Sorry guys, we couldn't deliver on that. We know that we said that we were doing things differently. Here's what happened. Sorry about that. We'll try our best to not do that in the future.” But you don't bullshit them about that. You just give them the truth and be humble and honest about it.
I’ve noticed a lot of positive attitudes from gamers when this happens to indie developers. Lots of comments saying “Take your time” and concern for the mental health of the developers.
Laulan: Maybe they’re cutting us some slack because we're indies but I mean, that's still humans behind AAA games, even if gaming communities often make fun of those big tweets with an excuse letter from the developer when a delay occurs. It's been becoming a meme. But I don't know. Maybe it's because we've managed to bring a more human communication through our channels, and that resonates with the players. Maybe AAAs should try more down-to-earth and human communication? I don't have any explanation. But I agree with you. Usually, it's easier for the next Hollow Knight for instance, for Silksong to be delayed than for bigger AAA games.
Q: A lot of games cite Dead Cells as their inspiration. In turn, are there any games that influenced Dead Cells during its development?
Laulan: It's funny that you say that because when Supergiant approached us asking us for tips around Early Access and what we did with our roguelike we were so humbled and happy that they were asking us for advice and they told us, “Okay, we are going to take this as our main inspiration for our next game, Hades.” And it did really well for them. So we were super happy and stoked about that.
But to answer your question, the main inspiration for the game is obviously Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. And that's why in the first place, we wanted to make our own homage to this monumental game that is Symphony of the Night. But we really wanted to create a game that made you feel how you felt when playing Symphony of the Night and not actually how it's played, because if you take the same gameplay as Symphony of the Night and put it in Dead Cells you have a completely different game, obviously.
We were really focused on the game feel and speeding things up, to achieve a satisfying fast-paced combat system. That's our main homage to the game. And actually, a lot of the weapons, levels, and items are based on Castlevania items. So that's why when we did work on the actual IP for the Return to Castlevania DLC we were kind of embarrassed because we already had many of the weapons that we wanted to put into the game but were already there, just under different names.
This is the main influence for the game and obviously Dark Souls for the combat system that we wanted to have. Even if ours is more fast-paced, we really wanted to have that dodge and rolling and have these kinds of encounters with powerful enemies that can give you this fear of “I might die at any time during the game.” Gameplay-wise it’s more Dark Souls and influence-wise it’s more Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
Q: Dead Cells has played a major role in the growth of the roguelike genre, but not every game has managed to hit the mark. What do you feel is most important for a game like Dead Cells to be fun and engaging for players?
Laulan: Game feel. I think the recipe for success is definitely in the game feel. You could tell during game shows when you were giving away the controller to someone and instantly they’re like “Hmm… Not bad!” It feels good and intuitive. Even if you die in the first level like what usually happens during game shows for people that never played the game before. It has this game feel that makes it amazing while playing it and that's the main hook.
In the first five seconds, you get a sense of control and satisfaction just by moving your character and rolling through enemies and smashing doors and that kind of stuff. I think this is the biggest thing that makes Dead Cells what it is. Motion Twin spent countless hours on the smallest things that you wouldn’t even notice to make it feel right, with helpers and other stuff that you can’t really see while playing. But if we were to remove them, you would have a totally different game and a perfectly annoying one, I think.
Q: We’ve done a lot of retrospecting, so what’s next for Dead Cells? How far ahead have you planned for the future? Are there any particular goals that you’re trying to achieve moving forward?
Laulan: What I can say is that with the release of the Castlevania DLC, which was a way to circle back to the origins – and it was really satisfying to be able to bring our homage together for real this time – and now, we want to focus on our own game, rather than doing some crossover. We've been doing quite a few, and it was fun, and we loved it, but we don't want to be that game that's only doing crossovers.
We're not Fortnite. We have our own universe, storyline, and characters and we love them and we want to do more with them. So the idea is not just to do crossovers. Obviously, there are amazing games that we'd love to bring into Dead Cells, but right now, I think we really want to focus on different ways of playing. We want to take our time, and that means maybe bigger development time than we had before to really create a new approach to Dead Cells. So there may be a bit fewer updates in the next couple of years than there were before because we're working on something that we want to be different this time. In the meantime, we also have amazing stuff coming out such as an animated TV show and the board game as well.
Q: Evil Empire hopes to work on its own brand-new game as well. Is there anything you can say about that in terms of plans or ideas?
Laulan: It’s mostly under wraps. The Evil Empire team grew up a lot. There are 15 people working full-time on Dead Cells, and we also have two complete teams working on full games as well. We have more than 60 people now, and we have three projects at the moment. One is Dead Cells and the two others which I can’t talk about right now that are going to be really exciting for us. We are focusing on those three projects right now, which is quite a challenge for such a young studio, but I think we're on the right track.
Q: You mentioned the Dead Cells animated TV show. Can you talk about that a bit? How did it come about, and what has the process been like creating it?
Laulan: Basically, we’ve done animated trailers for each DLC and for the release of the game, partnering with Bobby Prod and Bobbypills, a French animation studio. We had this one-minute animation for each of our four big DLCs, and we really started to love that. It helped us to create some more depth to the universe and to the characters, a little side story going into the background of the Beheaded – the animated version of the Beheaded, which is inspired by the game, but not quite the same one – and people loved it.
For each DLC, we've been asked so many questions about “When is the animated series coming out?” because the animation style is really top notch and the action scenes they were putting into the trailers were really amazing. Each time, you can go to the YouTube comments and you'll see someone asking for the TV show. We were not taking it too seriously, because we know what one minute of this costs, and believe me, it's a lot. We did end up talking about that a lot with Bobbypills. We all wanted to make that happen, but we thought it was more like a fantasy that could never happen. Some stuff came out, some partners came in all at once, and we had this deal that was brought to the table involving Bobbypills and ADN (Animation Digital Network) which is a French animated streaming service, and it all ended up in creating a way of making this a reality.
So we watched some of the episodes and it's really, really fun. It's a bit different than what I thought in the beginning, but I can't say too much about that. It's a nice balance between exploring the Dead Cells world in a different way than we would have thought: a buddy movie! A lot of comedy and jokes and also action of course because this is Dead Cells and we're not here to wander around the castle, we need to get some zombies at some point. But yeah, that's the idea. I don't have any dates yet but it’s coming along nicely.
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Dead Cells is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.