Versus Evil

» see versusevil.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Versus Evil was set up in Baltimore in September 2013 by Steve Escalante, who had been marketing director at ZeniMax Online Studios and left to do the unglamorous half of independent games: contracts, store relationships, age ratings, console certification, the parts a four-person team has neither the time nor the stomach for. It stayed small for ten years. Thirteen people were still on the payroll at the end.

Its timing was very good. The label opened at the exact moment crowdfunding had filled a generation of small studios with money and no idea how to ship, and its first signing was the one that defined it. The Banner Saga came out in January 2014 from Stoic, a Texas studio of three former BioWare people, and it looked like nothing else on Steam that year: hand-painted Viking animation in the manner of Eyvind Earle, over a turn-based war you were expected to lose slowly. The caravan of survivors starved if you routed it badly.

Then tinyBuild bought it in November 2021, for 12.5 million dollars up front against up to 18.8 million more over the following three years. Two years into that earnout, on 22 December 2023, tinyBuild laid off the whole staff and shut the label. Escalante had already left. The company's website is still standing today, unchanged since the middle of 2023, with the catalog laid out as though somebody were coming back to update it.

~ the record ~

~ what it put its name on ~

The catalog is a good record of what independent PC games were in that decade. The Banner Saga got two sequels, in 2016 and 2018. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, crowdfunded on Fig for over four million dollars and made by Obsidian, went out under the Versus Evil name in 2018, which is a strange sentence when you consider the relative sizes of the two companies. Faeria and Guild of Dungeoneering came through as well, and so did Wintermoor Tactics Club in 2020, a tactics game set in a snowed-in boarding school.

Almost everything in that list started on a crowdfunding page, and that is where this catalog stops being reachable from where I am sitting. Kickstarter has never let a project be launched from Turkey. The list of countries you can run a campaign from has grown for over a decade and Turkey has not been added to it. From here you could back The Banner Saga with a card that worked abroad, and you could buy it afterward like anyone else, but the funding mechanism that rebuilt Western independent games between 2012 and 2018 was structurally something you watched other countries do. The games crossed the border easily. The thing that paid for them never did.

~ december 22 ~

tinyBuild's explanation was that Versus Evil continued to underperform, and the specific evidence was that three of its four planned 2023 releases, Broken Roads among them, had slipped into 2024. The layoffs landed on a Friday, three days before Christmas, and the timing did most of the damage to whatever goodwill the label had left. In the same month tinyBuild disclosed that it had settled a 3.5 million dollar legal dispute with Escalante and his head of production James Lance, along with the holding company that had owned Versus Evil before the sale. Every Versus Evil title moved onto tinyBuild's account and stayed on sale. Escalante and Lance started a new publisher, Digital Bandidos, in August 2024.

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