The company made two retail games, both for DS, and both for different publishers: the Breakout-esque
Nervous Brickdown for Eidos, and the touch-controlled shooter
Big Bang Mini for Southpeak, the latter of which Guermonprez said, "bombed ... But it went out, and that's the good thing." Guermonprez even offered to send special lenticular box covers, free of charge, to anyone in a region where Big Bang Mini wasn't packaged that way – just because he loves the physical artifacts of games.
The $25 game netted Arkedo about $2 per copy, he said. "Fast-forward four years with the Arkedo Series. The experiment was, I pick up two guys on the team, they have 30 days to make a game, and on day 30, the game is off. We sold it for like three bucks, and out of those three bucks, we got two bucks. We got the same amount of money for the Arkedo Series that we did for
Nervous Brickdown and
Big Bang Mini. And the customer paid ten times less."
That experiment prompted Arkedo to go "full speed for the digital stuff," at which point it started working on
Hell Yeah!. And now Guermonprez is moving even further into digital game development, starting up a new collective called Nice Guys. "I bought a house, I'll make game jams there, and we have people from different teams coming together to make one game, stay for 15 days and stuff like that," he said. "The majority of what we do is digital, but we are also keeping the idea of making a little edition where Aurelien the art guy can make little paintings and stuff like that, and we'll sign it, and things like that."
"We want you to have the best of both worlds."