Sega’s advance money came back to Two Point Studios in two and a half days.
The team had penciled in 18 months. What it got was two and a half days. Two Point Hospital landed on Steam in August 2018 and climbed to the top-selling position in over 40 territories — during a month that also handed players Madden NFL 19, Overcooked 2 and Monster Hunter World.
“It completely blew us away,” said Jo Koehler, Two Point’s COO. “I don’t know what we expected, but it wasn’t what happened.”
When the studio put pen to paper with Sega in 2016, the deal covered roughly 18 months. A decade on, it’s still standing, still counted among Sega’s most valuable first-party teams, and still shipping precisely the sort of game a boardroom once assured them had no audience.
Microsoft said sims weren’t sexy enough
The story starts at Lionhead. Founder Gary Carr shared a prototype team there with Ben Hymers — today the studio’s technical director — and the pair had collaborated previously, including on Lionhead’s studio sim The Movies. Carr floated the idea of building something fresh, with no ties to Lionhead.
“I was old and he was young,” Carr said. “I basically wanted to harvest his youth and cling to it.”
A joke, obviously. But youth was genuinely part of the equation. Hymers adored the Bullfrog titles Carr had a hand in — Theme Hospital above all — and repeatedly wondered aloud why nobody was building them anymore. The people signing off on games at Xbox supplied the answer.
“We pitched these games at Microsoft, and I remember at the time they were saying, ‘We need billion-dollar franchises. We leave that kind of money on the table,'” Carr recalled. “And that was a saying that really irked me a bit.”
That remark “bashed” the ambition out of Carr and co-founder Mark Webley. Hymers wouldn’t let go of it, insisting that nostalgia married to a solid management game was a genuine proposition — and Carr gradually warmed to the notion that Microsoft had misread the room.
“I think we assumed [sim games] had probably had their day, if I’m honest,” Carr said. “Ben definitely made me think twice about that assumption. When you’re in the industry for so long, you kind of don’t have a strong sense of public perception and what people want.”
From there the trio followed the reasoning to its obvious conclusion: if Microsoft was happy to leave money sitting on the table, somebody else could scoop it up. They billed themselves as “below AAA” and set off to find a publisher.
Sega had been wishing out loud for a studio like this
The timing verges on the ridiculous. Sega’s Searchlight initiative — set up to unearth smaller independent teams that would complement its larger releases — was in full swing, and it was hunting for projects below AAA. Carr learned afterwards that Sega’s executives had been telling each other, only days before Two Point reached out, how useful it would be to add a Bullfrog-style studio to the roster.
Then came 2016 and Microsoft’s closure of Lionhead, arriving mid-negotiation between Sega and Hymers, Webley and Carr. Suddenly a group of developers who already knew one another — and already knew how to make sim games — were looking for work. Carr also recruited Koehler, a seasoned producer whose CV included EA and Playsport, the team behind Motorsport Manager. Six people started production. By Hospital’s release, the count stood at 14.
Development ran the way it only can when experienced people who trust one another share a room.
“It was a very strong shared vision of what we were making, which really sped up the process,” Hymers said.
“We trusted in each other,” Carr said. “Everybody was very experienced, so there was a free-form attitude to design, to our style, and everybody was involved. It was wonderful, almost like we’d gone back 20 years to early game development in the 80s and 90s, where there wasn’t really that much documentation or process. It was just about energy.”
There was no audience to satisfy and no design document to obey. Carr described the team as allowing itself to “regress” toward the charming, lighthearted games it had built at Bullfrog and Lionhead. It functioned as therapy as much as commerce, and everyone involved treated it as one final chance to do beloved work alongside people they enjoyed.
Being number one on Steam is scarier than it sounds
Carr’s assumption was that Two Point would survive for as long as Sega kept the cheques coming — perhaps two years. Hospital performed unusually strongly in China, Germany, the U.S. and the U.K., every one of which caught the team off guard. Titles of this type had traditionally struggled in China and Germany, and Theme Hospital had done markedly worse in the U.S. than at home in the U.K.
“Our expected recoup time was about 18 months down the line, when we hoped we might have enough money to put behind the company,” Carr said. “Instead, we repaid Sega’s advances in two-and-a-half days. Which was nuts and a really emotional time. A lot of dev companies, they make a game and at the point they’ve released the game, they’re at their most vulnerable because they’re broke. They’ve spent all the development money, but thankfully and luckily, we were immediately in the black.”
The shock was mutual — Sega hadn’t seen it coming either. Because the initial contract said nothing about life after launch, Two Point hurried through an amendment and devoted the months that followed to squashing bugs, digesting feedback and answering players into the small hours.
The windfall came with a complication nobody had prepared for.
“There was fear,” Carr said. “We were a relatively unknown indie game studio, only founded two years before, and almost to the anniversary date of two years, we were number one on Steam. People can quite easily go on Company House and see you’re an independent studio, and we had a lot of people swarming around, a lot of outside interest.”
Sega had every intention of holding on to them, and the feeling was reciprocated: Sega had bankrolled the studio while asking for remarkably little in return — not even ownership of whatever IP emerged. The publisher supplied the money and stepped back. Rival approaches were waved off, and Two Point signed on as a first-party studio.
Campus proved the era wasn’t actually over
Hospital had been conceived as a send-off for a style of game, and a style of development, presumed extinct. It wasn’t extinct after all. Which meant Campus had to stand on its own terms instead of serving as another restoration project.
Webley’s view was that any setting works so long as people feel a connection to it, whether that setting is grand or utterly ordinary. Everybody has passed through an education system. Practically no one was making games about one. The decision made itself.
Koehler headed up the effort to gather post-launch feedback from Hospital — both the minor snags that caught players out and the broader question of who these players actually were. The verdict: precisely the audience Carr and his colleagues had spent their careers building for. They were after simulation with real depth that didn’t overwhelm them, plus lighthearted charm that didn’t sacrifice complexity. Hardly anybody was catering to that middle ground back then, and a decade later Two Point’s games are still nearly alone in it.
One element had shifted since the Bullfrog and Lionhead era, though. This audience held opinions — and had a place to voice them.
“Prior to that, we were typical developers for the time, who didn’t necessarily have a relationship with people that bought our games,” Carr said. “Now we literally ask our community what they want. It’s flipped my experience from being kind of in a bubble of development to actually spending time speaking to players. It isn’t just about keeping people buying your games. It’s about helping them, then helping you make a better game for the next time around.”
The thieves had to go
Responding to that feedback translated into sturdier technical groundwork for Campus and, later, Museum. Two Point began building console versions in parallel with PC, overhauling interfaces, button layouts and other Hospital pain points. The studio also engineered systems to elevate its simulated characters beyond what Carr termed “fodder.” In Campus you can flag favourite students and professors and receive updates on their progress, or find out when a student strikes up a friendship. Museum pushed the idea further still, adding staff traits, linked events, and the prospect of losing a staff member if an expedition to secure an exhibit goes wrong.
Listening also meant going back into games already on shelves. Museum launched with a security system less balanced than the current one, its design partly drawn from real-world heists the team encountered during development. Player complaints exposed the flaw immediately. Topicality is all well and good, Koehler said, but offering people creative licence to build a museum and then letting thieves dismantle it isn’t a fair exchange.
Scaling the studio to handle all of this brought up the issue the founders guard most closely. Koehler and the founders are united in the conviction that the moment layers of management appear, everyone loses out. Koehler “managed the hell” out of the operation, Carr said, precisely to prevent that. Fourteen staff when Hospital launched; 50 today, supplemented by carefully vetted support studios covering specialisms Two Point lacks internally.
“A lot of us have been at companies that have grown really big really quickly and it just kind of destroys the culture at the studio,” Hymers said. “And we didn’t want that because we liked how we work.”
“We’re all developers,” Carr added. “At bigger studios, you become managers. But the reason we got into games was to make games. So we all keep our hands on, and we stay small. Otherwise, we’d have to become managers again.”