By just about any metric, Dispatch was a wild success. After launching at the tail end of October 2025, it sold more than 3 million copies before the year's end, and at time of writing 97% of its over 165,000 reviews on Steam are positive. But in a GDC talk today, Dispatch creative directors and Adhoc Studio cofounders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart said their narrative superhero game's development was an act of hubris, because the industry was convinced their game was dead in the water.Along with fellow co-founders Pierre Charette and Michael Chung, Herman and Lenart formed AdHoc in 2018 after having left Telltale games—which, "by sheer coincidence," had shut down within a month of AdHoc's founding. Even before leaving Telltale, Herman said he and Lenart had "spent years discussing how we'd innovate and improve on the formula" of choice-driven narrative games.
