Leverage is a four-person team in Sweden that is helping game studios and publishers build lasting ideas and brands.
The company has been around for seven years and it has worked with more than 40 clients and projects. The list includes big companies like Bandai Namco and Plaion as well a small “one-man show up in the arctic circle,” said Christian Fonnesbech, CEO and head of IP at Leverage, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Sometimes the team consults with a studio early and sometimes it comes in late.
“We’ve met really arrogant teams, and we’ve met really humble teams,” he said. “We’ve really been around. And the big challenge is how do we reach the studio? Where does the game stop, and where does the IP start?”
He brings up the example of IO Interactive, the Denmark studio that grew to 200 people and created the Hitman franchise. They had created a total of four different game series, but Hitman was the biggest.
“Hitman was 65% of the value of the company,” Fonnesbech said. “You focus on gameplay and the tech and this is super necessary. But on top of that, there is a second business model. You’re building the love for your IP. With all the time people are spending with your game, they’re growing attached to your characters, and they’re getting used to that emotion and the journeys. So this is the IP part.”
And there’s a third part, about how you communicate that to the market.
“How do you position yourself so you stand out and appeal to the right people?” he said.
Origins
Fonnesbech was previously the head of IP at Nordisk Games, which was owned by a big conglomerate. He worked in gaming, entertainment, advertising, and film across decades and came to learn the value of IP. He worked on 30 games over his career.
“I’ve served my time in the trenches,” he said. “While at Nordisk, we realized there wasn’t even a language for this talk about IP and what’s missing from games.”
The company has a team of four, and it works with others as needed.
“We just realized nobody knows how to build an IP. They don’t even know how to figure out which is the right level of leverage. Some people are lucky they have an IP. What we do is advise on the problem we see is that most studios think like this. They just want to do a game and get it done and then they realize that what they actually needed was a lasting product.”
For that, you need to take the player on an emotional journey and give them a character that they really love. You want a character that is seeking revenge or trying to find peace. You have to design the IP so that it’s legally ownable and protectable, he said. It is what you normally ask when you’re reading a book or watching a movie. Why do I care?
“We realized that the big problem for the entire industry is that we don’t do pre-production on the IP. Because it’s just not a tradition. Gameplay used to be enough. So all these companies have grown up with a total focus on game content,” he said. “We produce the game. But the emotions and the characters and positioning — ah, let’s talk about something else. So a typical game development process is three to four years of development, and then it’s three months of IP.”
That turns into three months of brand panic and IP panic, he said, at the end of the game when it’s almost too late to change anything.
“What we’ve been doing for seven years is helping people to develop a clear idea early. The sweet spot is to do it early in pre-production, but of course often we get pulled in at 80% finish or relaunch,” he said. “We’re able to figure it out. If you do this, suddenly you’re standing out in the market because you’re not just a gameplay loop.”
This is necessary because there are maybe 17,000 games a year coming out on Steam. To stand out, you don’t have to just look at gameplay competitors. Your IP has to be memorable.
“Today, you also have to look at your emotional competitors. So it’s no use making a great hand-to-hand combat game. If your IP is exactly the same as Batman, then you’re not going to win. What is Batman doing emotionally? He’s in a big city full of corruption. He’s an orphan. Those are the central pillars of that IP. It’s not enough to compete on gameplay, you also have to compete on emotion.”
Getting buy-in
It’s not just a single writer that has to accomplish this, Fonnesbech said. He says the whole leadership team should get involved. But it’s very different from company to company, as some studios are driven by a single creative force and others are run by leadership groups. Some firms are riven by the crazies and the bean counters who don’t like working with each other.
An example of doing it backwards is Riot Games’ League of Legends. It built the most successful multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game with a lot of characters but not much of a story. Now it went back and created the back story, spending $250 million on two seasons of Arcane on Netflix. And now it built something that fans are emotionally attached to. And if you’ve ever been to a League of Legends championship match, you’ll see the emotion of the crowd. Sonic the Hedgehog from Sega started the same way, with a speedy character with attitude and fast gameplay. Now, with the movies, Sonic’s emotional center is coming into focus.
Fonnesbech believes companies like Remedy, CD Projekt Red and Naughty Dog have done brilliant jobs creating their IP.
“If you want to build a valuable IP, the thing is it’s not necessarily the thing that makes it a hit,” he said. “But it’s the thing that makes you sustainable,” Fonnesbech said. “I would recommend characters. You don’t have to have them, but it’s really good. Having a character is just a great anchor and template. You can talk about having an emotional journey. What is the emotional journey? Franchises and IPs are like cherished memories that you want to experience.”
He added, “If you’re picking up Hitman or the latest Bourne movie or so on, you’re expecting to have that emotional journey. Lara Croft is still looking for her father in the ruins, and, you know, Geralt of Rivia is still the outsider who’s trying to protect the people who actually don’t trust him. You’re coming back for that same feeling again. Then there’s having a unique world. You think of Hitman, you think of Lara Croft, you think of Superman. It’s a world and a certain tone and a certain attitude that you’re coming back to as well. So these things start adding up. The more of them you have, the more cohesive the IP becomes.”
When it works well
Some companies like Skybound, maker of The Walking Dead, will test a new IP in comic form. If it resonates, it puts the writer’s room to work on it and churns out different kind of media. It tests the waters and doubles down on the hits. Before The Walking Dead, the “good guys never died,” he said.
But people have to watch out for the “transmedia fallacy,” Fonnesbech said. “The idea that we’ll go out on six media at once and it will be a bigger hit. That doesn’t work. You have to put everything you have into going out on one medium and make it work. It’s so difficult to make one good piece of game or fiction or story.”
As for how things have worked in the last few years with 34,000 layoffs in the industry, Fonnesbech said there was a delayed effect for his own consultancy. While other big companies were hit earlier, the crisis arrived for him in the spring of 2024, when there was a big game.
“Things are booming now, and it feels like there’s a bigger need for this way of thinking because I think the publishers and the investors have become a little bit more cautious about investing in weird wonders,” he said. “If they are going to put all this investment in, they want to see something that will last.”
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