Making Dispatch was motivated by 'a mix of arrogance and stupidity,' its creative directors say
By just about any metric, Dispatch was a wild success. After launching at the tail end of October 2025, it sold more than 3 million copies before the year's end, and at time of writing 97% of its over 165,000 reviews on Steam are positive. But in a GDC talk today, Dispatch creative directors and Adhoc Studio cofounders Nick Hermand and Dennis Lenart said their narrative superhero game's development was an act of hubris, because the industry was convinced their game was dead in the water.Along with fellow co-founders Pierre Charette and Michael Chung, Herman and Lenart formed AdHoc in 2018 after having left Telltale games—which, "by sheer coincidence," had shut down within a month of AdHoc's founding. Even before leaving Telltale, Herman said he and Lenart had "spent years discussing how we'd innovate and improve on the formula" of choice-driven narrative games.
As AdHoc started seeking funding for new projects, however, it seemed like they might not get the chance. The live service era was ascendant, and potential partners were skeptical that singleplayer games in the Telltale model could turn enough of a profit to make the effort worthwhile."When we'd go and pitch potential investors and publishers, they'd point to the data and say there weren't enough recent successes to feel confident investing money," Lenart said. "The common sentiment was that the genre of games we like to make are niche—or worse, dead.""We thought they were wrong, which was definitely a mix of arrogance and stupidity," Herman said.
While it might have been propelled by a healthy amount of stubborn defiance, AdHoc's confidence wasn't baseless: After Telltale's closure, the studio boasted one of the industry's most experienced teams working in their specific lane of game development."We felt like, if we wouldn't push back, who would?" Herman said. "And while we didn't yet know how we were going to do it, we were aligned on the right things."According to Lenart, chief among those "right things" was a commitment to across-the-board quality. AdHoc was going to focus solely on its strengths. If it didn't think it would nail something, it wasn't going in the game—a commitment that might not have been possible if it had found a receptive publisher."Just because we can make an open world action RPG doesn't mean we should. Whatever we do, we want it to be great and across the entire project," Lenart said. "We didn't want to have any caveats."However much arrogance and stupidity was involved in Dispatch's development, the results indicate it was just the right amount.
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