We spoke with the Head of Rooster Teeth Games Michael Weidman and the Creative Director of Invisible Collective Phillip Johnson and PAX South to learn how Rooster Teeth got into the video game publishing world and learn a little more about Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars.
Gaming Conviction: Rooster Teeth recently began diving into the world of video game publishing, what led RT into this new part of the gaming world?
Michael Weidman: We’re huge fans of games obviously. Rooster Teeth was built around the idea of playing games. You know like Red vs Blue. It’s part of our culture. A lot of our fans play video games, and a big part of our content is games, games, and more games. So that led to us doing our own internal projects working on our brands, but then we kinda opened the idea of like ‘Well we’re already doing games, why don’t we help some of these Indie that are making these really cool games that people may not ever hear about. How can we help these guys?’ That’s what led to the thinking and we met guys like Battlesloths at shows like this and decided to help these guys use our community. We’re not going to try to sell them some shovel ware, but we want to find good games that really appeal to our audience.
GC: RWBY: Grimm Eclipse just released on Xbox One and Playstation 4 with much success, what can we expect from the game moving forward?
MW: So now that it’s on Steam and consoles we’re obviously going to continue to support the game and make sure there aren’t any glitches, bugs, and that kind of stuff. We do have a couple of cosmetic updates coming for Steam. We’re trying to see how things goal with the consoles. The one thing I want to establish cause a lot of fans have been asking is that as far as gameplay updates or DLC, we did the best we could with this game to where it is now and we’re probably always going to have RWBY in our hearts and make more RWBY stuff, but for this particular game it’s the game it is.
GC: Battlesloths 2025: The Great Pizza Wars was recently announced as the next game to be published by RT Games. What caught your attention about this game to get it published.
MW: Well sloths, chaos, and pizza. It really tickled our funny bone. It’s right up our alley with sensibility. In Rooster Teeth we don’t take ourselves so seriously. We love comedy, we love games, and it just checked all the boxes for us. It’s also a really fun game. I mean you might just look at it and just go ‘This is just crazy! It’s just a bunch of sloths fighting over pizza.’ but when you get in the heat of the moment playing with your buddies there’s a bunch of trash talking going on and we found ourselves on our lunch breaks playing the game more and more often. Finally we just went ‘We should just contact these guys and see if they’re interested.’ So that’s how it all came together.
GC: Battlesloths has cute, killing, customizable slots, will we see add-ons coming to the game to add more hats and weapons?
Phillip Johnson: So right now we have about 500 hats in the build and if you come to our weekly hat stream on Wednesday night you can come and recommend more hats for our artist Adrien to make. We’re shooting for about 700 hats in the final game, but not as DLC. We’ll just have it all as unlockable content in the game. As for future weapons and stuff we would love to support the game so if there are ideas that we think would be awesome, and if it’s viable for us to continue working on the game then we would love to continue supplying upgrades.
GC: If a game developer approaches Rooster Teeth Games with an idea, what would it take to get you on board with them?
MW: So just like I mentioned with Battlesloths. It’s quality over quantity for us. We’re looking for games that really kinda fit our brand. It doesn’t mean that it’s anime or anything like that, it’s just a game that is like ‘Hey this is a game that we really like and our audience has probably never heard of this.’ but it hits all of the check-boxes that are in line with Rooster Teeth brand.
