Mad Mushroom pilots creator published games with Rumble Club

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Mad Mushroom, the publishing arm of content creator collective OTK Media, is partnering with Lightfox Games to publish Rumble Club on April 23. The cross-platform physics-based brawler will launch on April 23 on PC and mobile. Eager fans can sign up for early access on Steam from today, March 21, until March 28.

The title takes notes from a variety of genres, including battle royales and platform fighters. Players will fight with their fists and goofy gadgets to knock opponents into the goo below.

“With Rumble Club we set out to make an accessible and addictive brawler that anyone — casual or competitive — can play anywhere,” said Ryan Murphy, CEO of Lightfox Games. “We’ve found a great partner in Mad Mushroom: a publisher that was able to move fast to help bring the game to market and reach a wide audience of players who we hope will enjoy the game as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.”

With its April 23 launch around the corner, Rumble Club is emerging as the standard bearer for creator published games. As the first title published by Austin, Texas-based Mad Mushroom, Rumble Club will be the first major data point testing the thesis of creator-led publishing.

“After our first play session of Rumble Club we knew we had to bring this title into the Mad Mushroom portfolio,” said Mike “Sibs” Silbowitz, CEO of Mad Mushroom. “This is exactly the type of title we are looking for: late in development, incredibly fun, inherently social, made by a talented dev team, and deserving of discovery.

Rumble Club gameplay

Lightfox aims to find the sweet spot of easy to learn, but hard to master in Rumble Club. While the game looks to be accessible, the title still has plenty of depth and game modes for players to explore.

Lightfox Games plans to add new modes with themed updates seasonally. For its launch season, Rumble Club takes off into outer space with low gravity gameplay and out of this world cosmetics.

At Game Developers Conference, I got a chance to play Rumble Club ahead of its launch. The party brawler takes inspiration from a variety of sources — Super Smash Bros., Fall Guys and Gang Beasts come to mind — to create something entirely new.

Gotta go fast

The leadership at both Lightfox and Mad Mushroom are comfortable moving quickly. Rumble Club will launch 16 months after Lightfox began development in January 2023. Moreover, Mad Mushroom first saw the game in December 2023 at an event hosted by 1AM Gaming.

Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without a wealth of experience to draw from.

Prioritizing watchability

The deal between Mad Mushroom and Lightfox came together so quickly because of the teams’ shared ethos.

In consultation with OTK’s creators, Lightfox Games added additional features to make the game more appealing for streamers. The most notable addition is Rumble Club’s stream queue mode.

Rumble Club’s stream queue is designed to work for creators no matter the size of their audience. For large audiences, the team stress-tested stream queue for up to 15,000 players. For smaller creators, streamers have the option to keep some players in the active lobby and refill the remaining spots.

While the team is considering adding badges to denote subscribers, stream queue will not prioritize subscribers over other fans.

Rumble Club will also ship with more quality of life tools to make content creation easier.

At launch, Mad Mushroom will leverage all of OTK Media’s resources to promote the title.

Mad Mushroom pilots creator-led publishing

Rumble Club is the highest profile example yet of creators publishing games and challenging the traditional game publishing model.

With plenty to prove, Rumble Club will launch April 23, 2024 on Steam, Epic Game Store, iOS App Store, and Google Play Store.