Martin Frývaldský: how Warhorse sold 17 million Kingdom Come copies

Martin Frývaldský, CEO of the Czech studio Warhorse, the maker of Kingdom Come, says the team is working on a Lord of the Rings project in parallel with a new game set in the Kingdom Come world. According to him, it will not be “Kingdom Come in Middle-earth”: the world is more mythological, and the story centres on the classic struggle between good and evil.

Frývaldský came to head Warhorse from private equity and the railway business, which makes him a rare exception among game studio bosses, who are usually developers, designers or artists themselves. He told his story in a new episode of The Forbes Show podcast.

From publisher rejections to a hit. The studio was founded by Dan Vávra and Martin Klíma, who at first looked for a publisher without success. “We got thrown out everywhere. Literally. Even by our current shareholders from Embracer Group,” Frývaldský recalls. Until the Kickstarter campaign, he says, nobody believed in the project.

Fourteen years later, the numbers speak for themselves: the two Kingdom Come games have sold exactly 17 million copies combined. The second game sold a million copies in a day, two million in two weeks and three million in three months.

What Warhorse looks like today. A small studio with big ambitions has grown into a company whose revenue last year was 3.8 billion Czech crowns, with EBITDA topping two billion. Warhorse employs about 300 people. Working on what? “On a new adventure in Kingdom Come. And we’re also making The Lord of the Rings, and that is simply a bomb,” Frývaldský says.

The new game, he says, will be simpler and cleaner morally than Kingdom Come, which has plenty of bandits, deceit and, at times, killing. But it will be made by the same people: Kingdom Come 1 and 2 showed that the studio can build large story-driven games in big worlds, and that skill is “exactly” what Tolkien’s universe calls for.

In the podcast, Frývaldský also talks about the recent large-scale cyberattack on the studio, his gaming dream and why this is not the best time for game studios on the market.

By the Around Prague newsroom