Undisputed hit: An indie-made boxing game featuring real fighters has just sold 1m copies
Nice console games Undisputed has sold one million units.
The boxing game is by Sheffield-based indie studio Steel City Interactive, a developer set-up by brothers Ash, Asif and Asad Habib, who had never worked in video games before.
The story of the studio is a rare one. Formed in 2020, the brothers taught themselves how to make a game and began speaking directly to the boxing industry in an effort to secure licenses.
“I’ve obviously been a huge gamer my entire life,” begins Ash Habib, CEO of Steel City Interactive. “And I’m a boxing fan. My brother called me up one evening and said ‘why don’t we try a little side project?’ That’s how it started. We were making it in our living room. And I got hooked on game development. We started doing everything: code, learning animation, animation trees… doing everything from watching tutorials, googling how to do things… And it just snowballed.
“I quit my job. I poured all my resources and everything into setting the company up. And it just grew legs from there.
“We then got people from the boxing industry involved. And then people from the games industry… which was a lot harder, to be fair. Because here I was saying that we were going to make this huge boxing game, but I have zero experience, zero budget… it just sounds like a bit like a crazy pipedream.”
Naturally, games investors and publishers were sceptical. The notion of a small independent outfit making an ambitious sports game – albeit based on a sport that had been absent from video games for over a decade –- is not something you’d usually see. These sort of ambitious moves tend to come from the likes of EA or 2K, not start-ups from three brothers with no video game experience.
But what venture capitalists and investors were presented with was more than just a pitch deck, and it won over the likes of London Venture Partners and Novator.
“We did things a little differently,” Ash continues. “We didn’t go to people with a presentation to say ‘hey, there’s a gap in the market here and we want to make a game’. We did it all ourselves as much as we could, to get it to a level where we could see it as a real thing. I signed a lot of licences before any of the VCs came along. We had a functioning game before the VCs came along. We did a lot of the groundwork ourselves. And for me that is exactly how we wanted to do it. This is our game out of our own passion. And it just grew organically to the point where it’s at today.”
“Here I was saying that we were going to make this huge boxing game, but I have zero experience, zero budget… it just sounds like a bit like a crazy pipedream.”
Although the boxing industry was more receptive to Steel City Interactive, at least to begin with, it isn’t an easy sport to work with. Ash had to work on numerous individual contracts to get real fighters in the game. In fact, he tells us that Undisputed has 50% more real people in it than the last boxing game, and there’s still more fighters to be released.
“One of the reasons there hasn’t been a boxing game for so long is because it’s not like other sports,” he tells us. “With most other sports, you don’t have to go individually ask every competitor whether they want to take part. You can go to whatever federation or organisation or league they’re signed up to.
“With boxing, every single fighter is their own entity. So one of the reasons why I think there hasn’t been a boxing game for quite some time is that it is quite difficult to get everybody together and have individual deals with every single fighter.
“On the other side, for some of the other fighters and people involved, there hasn’t been a boxing game for quite some time, all these other sports are getting basically free publicity for their sport… boxing is being left in the dark ages. We had to go through a whole period of explaining this to the people who run boxing, and try to get them to realise that they are kind of getting left behind in the digital age.”
The boxing industry has signed up to Undisputed, however. And there’s even an esports element to the game with the various boxing bodies involved, including the World Boxing Council, backing official tournaments.
“Esports was part of the original vision for the game,” Ash adds.
“I didn’t want the esport element to feel like a bolt-on or something that needed doing separately. With that in mind, we partnered with the WBC, where there will be an esport element where you can actually win a physical WBC belt, given by Mauricio Sulaimán, who is the president himself. So esports is in our plans, and will form a big part of Undisputed.”
The game entered Early Access last year and the reception had been strong going into launch, so Habib wasn’t entirely surprised that Undisputed has gone on to sell strongly. However, the one million figure is still ahead of projections.
“There hasn’t been a boxing game in 12 to 13 years,” he explains. “The way we’ve done Early Access and built our community, and the numbers we were seeing… I was hoping for a pretty good launch.
“But this is my very first time. I have no benchmarks to compare this against. I could act like a spoiled brat and go ‘a million’s a million, what does that even mean?’ But in real terms, I know it’s a pretty incredible achievement for an indie studio’s first title. And we’ve gone above our forecasts that the publisher had.”
Going forward, the team is focused on the game, and although there are a few new roles to add, we shouldn’t expect Steel City Interactive to grow much beyond the 75 people who work there now.
Yet with a hit sports game, an active community and esports tournaments to come, it’s inevitable that Steel City is going to attract the attention of bigger players in the market. It wasn’t too long ago (just over three years) that EA and Take-Two entered a bidding war to acquire fellow UK studio Codemasters due to its success with the F1 racing series.
“Over the last few years, we’ve had companies approach us about things like that,” Ash concludes. “But that hasn’t been my focus. I set out to make a boxing game that had all the things that I wanted to have in it. My priority has just been focusing on the title. And whatever the future holds in that space, I will just let that play out But our main motivation and driver is to make sure we have an authentic boxing game. Whatever happens next, as long as it doesn’t distract or take away from that, I am fine with it.”
