Dino Patti on making multiplayer easy, Stop Killing Games, and ongoing legal wrangles with Playdead

Dino Patti made his name as co-founder of Playdead – the studio behind the indie classics Limbo and Inside – alongside Arnt Jensen back in 2006. But Patti left the company in 2016, shortly after the release of Inside, and since then has focused his efforts on Coherence, a tool that enables small developers to easily implement multiplayer and flexibly scale up (or scale down) the back-end server architecture.

Recently, Coherence celebrated its 2.0 launch, as well as the acquisition of the company by Roundtable Interactive Group (backed by the investor EMK Capital). Now, in an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Patti reflects on the evolution and future of Coherence, as well as his long-running legal battle with Playdead’s Jensen.

On the sale of Coherence to Roundtable (whose portfolio includes GameMill Entertainment, Outright Games, and Auroch Digital, with the latter having recently been acquired from Tencent-owned Sumo Digital), Patti says it shouldn’t come as a surprise. “When you start these things out and you start taking venture investment, it’s kind of inevitable that this is the end goal. I don’t think a lot of people realise that. So for us, the whole journey was leading up to something like this.

“I never started Coherence for it to be about me. It was about collecting a lot of great people around a great mission, and then they fly. And when this opportunity came about, I thought, this is actually what we’ve been looking for. […] They understand our vision, they want to drive our vision, they have several companies that can help the vision on the way.”

Patti is satisfied that Roundtable offers the right fit. “They didn’t buy us to take the tech and pull it apart,” he says, adding that if a giant like Google or Amazon had been the buyer, there would have been a risk that Coherence’s tech would have simply been absorbed.

That tech has been finding its way into more and more games over the seven years since Coherence was founded, chiefly because it enables multiplayer to be added relatively easily to games that weren’t designed with multiplayer options from the start. The company has just announced a new partnership with Poncle to bring multiplayer to Vampire Survivors – Patti says the team behind the game “didn’t know anything about multiplayer, didn’t want to deal with it, and we just […] made it happen. So that was a match made in heaven.”

The 2.0 update introduces hosting flexibility, allowing teams to choose between cloud hosting, client hosting, and self-hosting, as well as new pricing structure: the Coherence development tools are free for studios with under $200K in revenue, while the Pro Tier offers a $1,000 per month flat fee for larger studios. Hosting costs, meanwhile, scale up and down with the number of monthly active users. And Patti notes that Coherence now has “deep integration” with Unity, enabling developers to be up and running within minutes.

According to Patti, the key target demographic for Coherence is single-player games where “you can see the game could just as well be played with a buddy, and we go in and help them make it multiplayer.” He adds that Coherence follows in the footsteps of how Unity was started, giving small developers the chance of playing with the tools without any up-front costs. “I love that philosophy that if somebody has an idea, they don’t need to be part of a team where they have network programs and so on. They just should be able to make that idea come true. I think that’s how we get the best and most creative ideas. And if you look at all the games today, a lot of it started because of Unity.”

But he thinks there’s more to be done with multiplayer. “I love single-player games, I love how emotional they can be, and I think the multiplayer space has not really been explored in that way.” He adds that the fresh crop of lo-fi co-op games we’ve seen recently, like RV There Yet?, is something Coherence wants to support. “How do we make it even easier? That’s the big inspiration.”

Life beyond server shutdown

Coherence’s flexibility in terms of hosting could be a big help for small studios experimenting with multiplayer. “They could start with peer to peer. If they get really successful, they can do servers, and when the game falls in popularity, they could go peer to peer again.” The latter point, about scaling down server support, is something that has overlap with the Stop Killing Games movement and its demands for retaining online services or putting them into players’ hands rather than axing old games completely. “Every time I see a video about it, I’m like, ‘This is what we want to solve’,” says Patti (who nevertheless notes that he is not involved with Stop Killing Games).

“You cannot force Ubisoft to put money into something where they pay more for the service than the community brings in. But you can solve it by technology, by letting these games always be able to run. So maybe the big servers with hundreds [of players] are not available, but at least you can play four players on the server. That’s what we are providing, and I would love to fix that.

“I don’t want to lose the trust in digital products. I have a huge faith in games, and when I buy something for my Steam catalogue, even though I don’t know fully who owns it, I expect that I can always play it to the end of time. I bought The Crew and it shut down before I ever played it. I don’t want to lose the trust that I cannot just buy games anymore.”

He says that he understands on a business front that at some point the server costs will eventually outweigh income for a game with a shrinking player base. “But it is easy for us to just turn back to do peer to peer. You lose a bit of network quality, but it doesn’t matter for most people.” He adds that another option would be for players to pay the server hosting fees themselves, like they do in Minecraft. “There’s something to this flexibility and freedom. I think every game developer needs to think [about it].”

Uphill battle

Patti says that as a game developer himself, he knows all of the problems that might come with turning a single-player game into a multiplayer one. “Most people are like, yeah, ‘You cannot do that’. And then we get the source code, and within two or three weeks, we play their game with them, and we’re like, ‘Ta-da!'” It’s at that point, he says, when the developers start to see the possibilities and not just the problems. “As soon as you try it and are in the world and you’re playing together, you’re shifting the thought to, ‘Hey, how do we solve this?'”

Coherence usually charges to create multiplayer prototypes like this. “But for some people,” says Patti, “if it’s a high profile game, we also offer to do it for less. And doing that is just a magical moment.”

But even so, it’s been difficult to convince people of Coherence’s magical properties. “It’s an uphill battle,” Patti laments, noting that developers don’t tend to really comprehend the possibilities and potential until they actually see their own game running on the SDK. Again, he likens it to Unity and the struggles that firm had to convince people at the very beginning. “Me and other developers were saying, ‘Hey, but we have our own engine. Why should we use yours?’ […] Then you fast forward 15 years, and you don’t have that question anymore.”

For Patti, selling people on the transformative powers of Coherence is a personal crusade. “I did this for developers,” he says, recounting how it all began with his own development difficulties. “I was starting to think about building a multiplayer game, and I was trying to look for a technology where I could easily test and try things, and I just felt everything out there was just a hindrance for that. So this became a weird side quest for me.”

He’s also mindful of the service’s legacy, noting that in some of their custom contracts they have arrangements for the developers to continue using the code and services if Coherence should cease to exist for some reason. “That’s an important thing for me, because trust is one of the most important things. When people make games, they use two to five years of their life, plus they sacrifice a lot of other things. […] You don’t want to base your technology on something you can’t trust. So trust is just a huge thing in the development community. And the reason that Unity lost a lot of customers recently is because of the thing they did with Runtime, and people realized that they might not always be our friends.”

Patti has publicly stated that he’s not “planning to leave any time soon” now that Coherence has been sold, but he does pine for his old game development days. “I miss it. I miss it a lot.” Looking back, he admits he went into the creation of Coherence naively, thinking it was something he could do in two or three years. But the reality was very different: not least in terms of raising money, which meant connecting with a completely different group of investors from those he was used to in the game dev space, people who “did not know what I’ve done or who I was.”

Seven years is a long time to be away from game development, especially coming off the back of one of the most critically acclaimed and influential indie games of all time. “I really miss making games,” Patti sighs. “You work with so many talented people, and you have your head down and just concentrate. When you’re developing, it’s not about fame, it’s just about good quality product. I really, really love that environment.”

Patti’s eyes light up when he starts talking about the old days. Maybe it’s finally time to go back to game dev? “We’ll see. It would be fun. The plan is to do games at one point, for sure. It’s just when is that one point? That’s the real question.”

Limbo legal

Not that the old days were all golden. Since their acrimonious split in 2016, Patti has been locked in legal battles with Playdead’s co-founder, Arnt Jensen.

“It is what it is,” shrugs Patti, who says they had a recent, failed attempt at arbitration. “So now we are meeting in court next year in November. I don’t know what it’s about. I think he’s still really hurt about a lot of things, and now he’s trying to go after me.”

The latest dispute is over Patti sharing images relating to the development of Limbo on social media. “In Denmark, we don’t have fair use the same way as other countries. He suddenly had one legal thing he could go after me [with], and that’s what he chose to do. I don’t understand the reasoning, and I think it’s super stupid, but I also feel like I need to go through with it. I really like to stand by my actions, and I feel with this, I’m spending a lot of money on it, and I’m going to spend more just to fight it.”

He’s aware that the press will have a field day when the trial begins. “I submitted so many things to the court about that period and how he tried to take over the company in crazy ways. And if we go through the trial, all that would be a really fun thing for you guys to dig into.”

But Patti thinks the very public airing of grievances will be worth it to set the record straight. “He’s trying to delete me from the story of Playdead very aggressively. He’s removed me from the credit lists, he’s disputing that I was a co-founder, he’s writing shit about me… And those are the things I want to fight and prove. And that’s why I’m continuing it, even though it’s stupid.”