Despite having nearly its entire back catalog on Steam, Suda51's studio doesn't benefit much from sales of its old games: 'It's really nice for the other people who are making bank off that, though'
Despite a reputation for making cult games, Japanese director Suda51's studio Grasshopper Manufacture has survived for 27 years—long enough to have now ported much of its back catalog of console games to PC. A look at the difference between Grasshopper's developer listing page on Steam and its publisher listing page, though, reveals a too-common struggle for game studios that can't afford to finance their own games: they also don't benefit from the long tail of sales.
"For most of the games that we have up on Steam, we're not the publisher for them. We just made them," said Suda51 in a recent interview. "We do have a bunch of games on Steam—it looks like some of them are doing pretty well. Continuously well, even. Unfortunately we don't make very much money off the Steam sales. Other people are making plenty of money off sales from Steam, but we're not making the kind of money off of Steam to say 'hey, let's make a big-ass game like [Romeo Is a Dead Man]. It's really nice for the other people who are making bank off that, though."
While Grasshopper is listed as the publisher on ports of Suda's '90s visual novel The Silver Case and the 2024 remaster of Shadows of the Damned, it's merely the developer on all the games in the No More Heroes series and cult classic Killer7. And it's credited as neither on Lollipop ChainSaw RePop, a remaster of its bestselling game made without its involvement.
Grasshopper's new game Romeo Is a Dead Man, which is out on Steam today, was funded by parent company NetEase, which acquired the studio in 2021. Up until a few months ago Grasshopper had been talking to other companies to serve as publisher for Romeo, but Suda said NetEase offered them "the opportunity" to publish it themselves.
"We thought, okay, well, how hard can it be? So we decided to self-publish and realized how hard it can be," he said. "There's lots of stuff publishers do for you: all kinds of stuff that we didn't know, stuff we didn't know how to find out about, so it's been a real challenge. But it's been a good experience. We've learned a lot. It's been harder than working with a publisher, but at the same time, on top of learning a lot, self-publishing means that you make more money in the end, because you don't have to give a big chunk to somebody else. It's hard to say which is the best or most ideal situation, but at least for now, I'm glad that we're doing Romeo on our own."
Considering China-based NetEase has divested from or shut down a string of its international studios over the past year, I hope for Grasshopper's sake that Romeo Is a Dead Man is a hit—and that it's around long enough to finally benefit from the steady stream of cash that seasonal Steam sales can bring in.