Enotria: The Last Song - Interview with Edoardo Basile

Prankster101 talked with Project Manager Edoardo Basile about the action RPG Enotria: The Last Song:

Enotria: The Last Song – interview with Edoardo Basile (Project Manager, Jyamma Games)

One of the games which stood out this year at Gamescom, if only for the fact that it commanded a massive presence at the show – the sort of presence that’s normally reserved for major AAA publishers like Ubisoft, and major AAA titles like Call Of Duty – was a Souls-like game by the name of Enotria: The Last Song. And whilst there was no doubt in my mind that whoever was developing the game had taken the unprecedented step of putting across an incredibly bold face, what surprised me even more however was the fact that Enotria is actually the product of a relatively small indie game studio in Milan (Italy) that harbors very big dreams of wanting to operate on the international stage.

I spoke to Edoardo Basile (Project Manager) about the struggles which his company, Jyamma Games, has experienced in bringing Enotria to the market, and how the studio has fared in a socio-political environment that continuously perceives gaming as being an irreverent pastime. As part of this, and during our conversation, Edoardo Basile was able to impart his studio’s vision of wanting to put Italy on the map, and how, despite having no real support, Jyamma Games wanted to show the world that “underdogs matter”. Enjoy!

Prior to Gamescom this year, I’d never heard of Enotria before. From my perspective, the game literally came out of nowhere. You obviously did a lot to promote it, to the extent that you made it seem like a AAA production, and where the game got the sort of attention that’s normally reserved for AAA heavyweights like Call Of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Halo… But the level of effort you went to in order to promote your game at Gamescom this year was pretty impressive. With that said however, how come nobody’s heard about Enotria before? And regarding Jyamma Games… How come I’d never heard of your company before. What’s your story?

Actually, it’s probably because the company itself is just 4 years old. The first year, we were just 9 people, and the company developed mobile games. And 3 years ago, we suddenly decided to go bananas and do a console game. And we basically moved from 9 people to 50 people in a matter of 6 to 12 months, something like that. But for sure, we’re not a AAA production, and we’re still a indie company. And it makes sense that people don’t know that much about us. But actually our… let’s just say, “public story”, started at Tokyo game Show 2022. We released the first trailer there, and we had a small booth in the Indie Arena. It was our first public event. We basically focused our first year on engaging with the press. We did a lot of work in Italy, and then we decided that it was time to go bigger, and to go to an international stage. And we actually received a lot of love from Asia and we got good recognition. But in the Western market, we didn’t feel as if we’d done enough. People didn’t really know enough about us, even if the product is very good, because our budget is limited. We don’t have the budget of FromSoftware or companies like that. So at one point, we decided that we were now confident in our product, and it’s very playable now. It has an acceptable level of polish that we can show to the public. And we said, “okay, let’s go big in Gamescom and TGS”. So this is why you’ve probably never heard about us. We are underdogs. And people are usually surprised, because underdogs are a surprise. We are a studio of 50 people. We are very proud to have something this unique and special, and this is something that is a very huge achievement for us.

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Thanks Couchpotato!