Fishing Cactus

Description

Fishing Cactus is a privately held company of 32 game developers located in Mons, Belgium that was established by four industry veterans in 2009.

With a core team which combines 30 years experience and 35 titles under its belt, Fishing Cactus creates compelling and high quality games tailored towards digital distribution platforms.

History

Once upon a time

Our story is quite simple and certainly a story you've heard many times. We were working inside a big AAA studio, working our asses out 10 hours per day (including week-ends and sometimes nights) on a X360 / PS3 game. We did it for 4 years until the whole project collapsed due to some bankruptcy of our mother company.

Ashes to ashes

Without a job, biting the dust we decided to make our own thing, to build a studio with a different approach, embrace the digital distribution business model and multiply business opportunities. This is why, on top games, we also decided to invest in Serious Games, at the time a underknown segment of video game. From 10tacle's collapse, we learned that to survive, you have to believe in a multi-risks, multi-titles approach.

Early days in the desert

Fishing Cactus is the story of 4 friends and colleagues with less than 500€ on the bank account. Initial years were difficult, we worked 12 hours a day and weren't even paid for our work (for 2 years). We worked on alimentary projects (this is still sometimes the case), we built-up the portfolio, we participated in tons of events.

People told us that creating a game studio in Belgium was insane, that it would be challenging to find great talents here. Steps by steps we started to attract better people, to build a core team we can rely on. This is still how we work today, step by step making everything better than it was yesterday.

From desert to Oasis

We are not in the "huge teams" on a "AAA" single project. Spending more than 2 years on a single project just doesn't feel right for us and often leads to a lot of frustration and tears. It doesn't mean we haven't the ambition to make good games to the contrary, like many indies we rely on small, autonomous and clustered teams who are committed and believe in the projects they are creating. So far it took time but it starts to work for us. We also pride ourselves to put a strong emphasis on appealing graphics, innovative gameplay experiences following agile methodologies principles. We primarly think that the team behind a game is the most important factor of its success.

We initially started with mobile game developments only and about two years after that first phase we have been involved in smaller scale console developments. Today we are still developing mobile games but we are also involved in handhled, consoles and desktop game developments including our own IPs.

Projects

• Epistory
• Algobot