Remote Control Productions (RCP) might not be the best-known name in games, but the international production house continues to grow with two new studios coming under its wings.
The international production house currently supports 14 development companies and has helped ship over 120 games to date, including Bus Simulator 2018 on PC as well as mobile projects such as Playmobil Dinos.
“Our main purpose is to create long-term success for our developers,” says CEO Hendrik Lesser.
”We have a wide portfolio of services we offer them: business development, creative services, finance management, recruiting and talent development, production, marketing and PR, as well as sales, research and analytics.
"For all these functions we provide a team of experts and seniors, as especially indie studios often can’t manage all of it themselves and need expertise in these fields."
RCP recently welcomed two new studios to its growing support network with Big Blue Studios from Romania and Finnish developer Dreamloop Games - all part of the company's move to expand internationally.
“Dreamloop Games is now our second studio after Rockodile Games to strengthen our subsidiary in Finland,” Lesser explains.
“They are a talented, young studio with a hyper-communicative attitude that we highly appreciate.
“Big Blue Studios from Romania is an already well-established developer and in my view the perfect match to grow in a market on the rise. I’m very happy that the Romanian government just decided to boost the games industry with a $106.4m (€94 million) tech fund. This proves we’re absolutely on the right track expanding in Romania.”
A company having multiple outposts around the world is nothing new, but what's interesting is how these firms manage to organise so many people in so many disparate locations. Lesser says it's a combination of digital tools such as Slack, as well as regular meet-ups.
"We highly support cross-communication between our family studios," he explains.
"We use Slack for easy and fast every-day communication, sharing learnings, news and successes. We gather our studios twice a year for a developer summit at our headquarters in Munich for workshops, networking and strengthening the bonds.
"The beauty of the RCP model is that teams can work together for projects with a scope too big for one team alone. There’ll always be another team that’s passionate about the same project as well and is ready to partner to create something great together, grow with the challenge and exchange know-how. That’s very much a proven and tested system in the RCP family."
In the wake of the Big Blue and Dreamloop deals, Lesser says that RCP is still on the hunt for further deals and partnerships.
“We’re looking for talented studios with long-term potential that want to establish and grow their business with us as their partner," he explains.
"So it mainly comes down to if potential new teams understand how we as RCP work, what value we can create for them and how we face business relationships.
“If we find those in a team, that’s the perfect basis to start building a sustainable long-term relationship.”
Despite the firm's desire to grow, both at home and abroad, Lesser explains that it's important to not expand too quickly - slow and steady seems to be the way.
“One of our company values is sustainability," he says.
"That’s why we’re growing in a responsible and not in a short-sighted investment driven way. That also means, as we keep adding new teams to the family, we’re scaling internally in parallel to keep the services and the quality of our mentoring for the studios always on a significant level.”
“Especially as we work on growing our Finnish and Romanian subsidiaries, and we’re already making plans to bring the successful RCP model to more countries as well.”