With the studio fresh off recapping Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen’s eventful 2024, Visionary Realms CEO Chris Rowan is featured in a new interview talking about the game’s development, reaching 40k players, and the legacy that Brad McQuaid would be proud of.
The interview, with GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi, covers development, from the start through the years it took to get to the Early Access release. If you’ve been following Pantheon’s development, you know that the game entered Early Access on Steam on December 13th. Rowan reports that they have over 40,000 unique player accounts, the sales have been good, and they've seen over 6,000 peak concurrent players log in since the new phase began. This corroborates our reporting from our interview with creative director Chris Perkins earlier in the week.
Some might say that 6k players in three weeks isn't a whole lot, especially when you have 40,000 accounts, but this is still a fantasy MMORPG in development. Besides, the early indicators, sales, and feedback have been promising. “The numbers are great and the concurrency on Steam is strong,” Rowan says, with the game still hanging on after even cracking the top 10 on the first day.
There's a greater conversation tucked into this interview about the development process, getting to this point after beginning back in 2015, and the loss of McQuaid back in 2019. At the beginning, it was a few people who came up with the idea of trying to put together a classic MMO with high quality and to offer a new home to people who felt a little displaced with the rise of themepark MMOs. In the beginning, the funding really didn't materialize and development took a whole bunch of winding roads until we got to this point.
Related:
Interview: Talking Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's Early Access Launch With Creative Director Chris Perkins
“With Brad passing in 2019, people thought the project was going to die,” Rowan says. “ Maybe counter intuitively, it got the community and the team even more charged up. You know, when you believe in something, when you’re building a game because you want to play it yourself, when you’re really passionate about it, then people are going to see it through.” The community stepped up, and so did the team, wanting to get the game out, in part, for Brad.
See it through they have, with a current team that floats at around 18-20 devs, including some part-timers. The word “grit” comes up, and with a combination of investors and crowdfunding, doing this for $10 million required a lot of that.
“This might be the last studio that is really leaning into believing this can be a style of MMO that has legs today,” Rowan adds, on the obstacles and development and their steady commitment.
The full interview features more reflections, and development info, including a look towards the future now that Early Access is off to a good start in the hands of the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen community.
