If there’s one lesson to be learned in the games industry, it’s that past success is no guarantee of future success. It’s something that Travis George has found out the hard way over the past few years.

George began his career at Activision, but joined Riot Games as a game designer in 2008, just in time to ride the dragon that is League of Legends. “I was the team lead for all of League for several years,” he says. “I loved working on League.”

He later moved with Riot from California to Dublin to focus more on corporate development. But in 2018 he decided to found his own Dublin-based studio, Vela Games, along with Riot colleague Lisa Newon George and EA alumnus Brian Kaiser.

The idea was to create a welcoming, friendly, online game. But that dream was soon ground down by the harsh reality of a fast-moving and highly competitive industry.

High hopes

George says the team had “big ambitions” at the start. “We were going to build the next big free-to-play multiplayer online game,” he says.

That game, Evercore Heroes, launched into closed beta in June 2023. A competitive PvE title, it saw four teams of four players attempting to complete objectives at the same time as defending their Evercore, with the end game switching to head to head encounters.

At the time, George says the studio wanted to address some of the negative aspects of League of Legends. “Because two of us were on the League team for multiple years, we knew that one of the biggest challenges to League growing was not even just the community, but the perception of community,” he says.

“There’s this massive perception of problems in the community that prevent people who might actually love the game from trying it.”

“We had a core audience that loved it, but that core audience wasn’t big enough”

Travis George, Vela Games

The idea with Evercore Heroes was to create a game that anyone could have a fun time playing online. The aim was to dial down negative player behaviour and adversarial game mechanics, and remove any barriers to entry. Vela didn’t set out to “make everybody friends”, clarifies George, but the developers did want to ensure that players avoided “awful experiences, or hearing about what your mother did last night.”

The trouble was that not enough people turned up to the party. The Evercore Heroes closed beta ended in August 2023, just a couple of months after it started.

“We had a core audience that loved it,” says George, “but that core audience wasn’t big enough, and ultimately, the funding landscape had changed dramatically, and so we had to make some tough calls, scale back the team, wind down the game, and figure out what to do.”

Player perception

In hindsight, was there a bit of hubris involved in trying to take on League of Legends, I ask? “I think one of the biggest things that we learned from the first Evercore Heroes experience was that […] the perception was we were trying to take on League, but from our standpoint, we were actually doing the opposite,” says George.

“We were not trying to provide the same experience. We weren’t trying to take players from that ecosystem.”

“A big lesson that we learned was our internal vision wasn’t what people saw on the outside,” he continues. It may have looked like Vela was trying to take on Riot’s flagship, he says, but the aim was always to attract “people that might have wanted to play League, but would bounce off or didn’t want that core, adversarial experience.”

It’s easy to see how people might have become confused, however. Looking at the key art for League of Legends and Evercore Heroes, it’s hard to avoid noticing the similarities.

George responds by pointing out that hero-focused multiplayer games have all converged on a similar style. “Overwatch, Fortnite, League of Legends, even Dota: four of the biggest games in the world are all brightly coloured, slightly stylised.”

“We never were trying to say, like, ‘Oh, let’s make a game like League or better than [it]’, but there is a certain resonance with that style that signals approachable, right? That colourful, stylised style looks different than something like Elden Ring or Bloodborne. […] It’s a deliberate choice by creators to work in particular styles to signal the intent of the game.”

Too much, too soon

Evercore Heroes was attempting to innovate on the idea of competitive PvE, in which players work together against the environment, rather directly against each other.

“That’s where, looking back, it was just such a tall mountain to climb,” says George. “We needed to continue to invest in that space to really, really nail it, and then be able to communicate that very clearly. And I think we just didn’t quite get far enough on the polish of the game, but then also in the communication.”

“I think it would have been much simpler if we were just trying to build a different take on a MOBA, because we knew how to do that, right? And it would have actually ended up further along.” Instead, because Vela was trying to do something a bit different, focusing on co-op PvE rather than PvP, “we had no real guidelines to follow,” he says.

Feedback on the beta was mixed. MMORPG.com called it “impressive” from a technical standpoint, but criticised the gameplay loop for being “unclear and anticlimactic” and “not very intuitive” for new players.

“We were just in a position where we had to go for it.”

Travis George, Vela Games

George thinks they were trying to do too much all at once. “I think by stripping back some of the other things, we probably could have been on a better path.”

The idea was to launch the beta “with enough funding and runway to really develop it alongside the core community”, he says, gradually fixing the problems on the road to a 1.0 launch. But that “wasn’t available to us,” he says. “We were just in a position where we had to go for it. And we knew that, and it didn’t work out.”

Funding

In short, the money ran out. Raising venture capital hadn’t been a problem back when Vela Games was founded, and during the COVID pandemic that followed, the funding landscape “exploded”, says George. “So much money piled in.”

By 2023, however, the funding bubble had most definitely burst. “We actually had […] planned to do another round and keep the game in a long period of closed beta with no pressure to make revenue right away, because we just knew that that would be such a challenge,” he says.

But with player counts low and funding opportunities rapidly evaporating, Vela had no choice but to pull the game and downsize the studio. George reckons the funding landscape still hasn’t recovered to pre-COVID levels. “I don’t even think we’re halfway back to where we were.”

Still, he questions whether the games sector would even want to go back to that model of venture capitalists throwing money at start-up studios. “I hope collectively, we’ve learned some lessons as an industry.”

Redundancies

With few options left, George made the difficult decision to make around 80% of Vela’s employees redundant. “It’s the least fun thing you can ever imagine, letting someone go,” he says. “It’s just gutting. And you absolutely feel like you’ve let everybody down.”

But there was little choice, he says. “Most of our costs went towards the team, and it was something that was just purely unsustainable based on how the game went. It was one of the tougher experiences I’ve ever had, and probably ever will have.”

He says it was better to do a large swathe of redundancies all at once rather than draw out the process. “We didn’t want to create this doom loop of six months, every month, somebody else gets laid off, and you could never recover from it. And really importantly, we felt like we had the core of something that we could build on.”

Relaunch

Coming back from that disaster hasn’t been easy. “We’ve been through the literal wringer,” says George.

“Making games is super hard – I’ve never worked on an easy one. But the things that we’ve gone through the last couple years with a small team with barely any funding have just been one of the biggest challenges – and biggest growing and learning opportunities, I think – for all of us.”

The new version of the game – Evercore Heroes: Ascension – launches into Steam Early Access this week. It’s now been completely reimagined as a roguelite with procedurally generated missions. Gone are the four teams of four: instead, the missions can be tackled cooperatively by up to three players, but they can also be played solo.

“It’s not the same game at all,” says George. “It’s a second game.” Although set in the same universe, it takes a very different approach. “What we really wanted to do was […] to go back to that core guiding principle of building a game that you can just have fun with people on,” he says.

The downside is that this reimagining has been a hard sell for some dedicated fans of the original. “Not everybody wants the second game, because they wanted the first.”

Keep it simple

In hindsight, George recognises that the original concept for Evercore Heroes was far too complicated. “That complication led to a lot of barriers to entry for people.”

He wishes Vela had started out with something much simpler in the first place. “I think it’s okay to start small,” he says. “Reflecting on the last eight years at Vela, trying to go big on everything is just so hard.”

Now, with a smaller team and a more manageable concept, he can see a way forward. “Evercore Heroes: Ascension doesn’t need to sell 5 million copies in the first 12 months to be profitable, right? For what we’ve spent on the game and what we expect of it, we look at it as an opportunity to rebuild, finding that core audience.”

‘Start small, grow gradually’ is the new ethos. It aligns with the current prevailing trend for sustainability in the games industry, following the ‘go big or go home’ largesse of the pre-2022 years.

George cautions other developers against rushing. “I think you shouldn’t even go near releasing the game until you’re confident that it’s great,” he says.

“Launching something that’s dead on arrival really just means the end”

Travis George, Vela Games

“Make sure you’ve got something that players want before you go through those phases. […] Because launching something that’s dead on arrival really just means the end.” He suggests taking time to assess the addressable market, then finding an audience and building towards it. “That’s a much more appealing proposition than ‘Go big with something that we’re not sure is going to work out’.”

He speaks from bitter experience: and he’s aware that Vela, or rather the remnants of it, is in a lucky position. “Despite the hardships and difficulty and everything that we’ve had to go through, we at least have a second chance – whereas a lot of developers don’t.”

“My advice for anybody is just make sure you’ve got something that people want before you progress through that. It’s never too late to decide to not launch.”

This article has been updated to reflect the revised release schedule for Evercore Heroes: Ascension.