Retail vs digital @ Rock Paper Shotgun

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Last week I did an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. I don’t know yet what the journalist used from the interview, but I’m a little bit ill at ease, because I shouldn’t have done the interview in the condition I was in, having had a sleepless night. Anyway, they posted an excerpt to announce the interview, and that generated quite some reactions already, so I wanted to post the link here.

Update: The full interview is online now here.

The topic is digital vs retail, and my position on it is that if you’re an independent developer, and you’re doing digital only, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue. I wrote a bit in the comments section to clarify the point.

The spending of the marketing budget

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I’ve been raging a bit here about creative use of publisher costs, and somebody mentioned in the comments on “How Larian ended up self-publishing” that it’s only normal that costs associated with press events should be deducted from a developers royalties.

So I browsed through my picture library and found some pictures from PR & marketing events I participated in.

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Quality over quantity in RPGs

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Whenever I manage to get home before my kids go to bed, I am forced to tell them the next adventure of Little Green Dragon. Little Green Dragon you see is the sequel to Little Blue Dragon. He’s been having an epic journey through an enormous fantasy world for over two years now, fighting against the evil Nomen who just recently abducted Little Green Dragon’s mother.

I used to think the first Divinity was only going to be a 20 hour game

It’s becoming pretty hard for me to keep up with my own story, and unfortunately my kids have excellent memories, so occassionaly I need to carefully query them about some of the well-known facts of the little dragon universe. I even started taking notes.

The thing they like the most I think is that it’s a neverending story. Whenever I try to bring some closure, they want to know what happens next . Running out of inspiration and hoplessly caught in a spiderweb of plotlines, I tried finishing the story once, but a young boy crying and a wife giving me the evil eye, forced me to add yet another plot-twist, meaning that Little Green Dragon still has a very long journey ahead of him.

My personal equivalent of listening to Little Green Dragon stories is playing RPGs & reading books, so I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I too like my RPGs to be very big, and I rarely read a fantasy book if it’s not at least a trilogy. If it’s not big enough, then I don’t feel it’s worthwhile investing myself in the protagonist, because what I’m looking for are grand epic adventures, Lord of the Rings like.

So recently the discussion of size versus quality popped up again at Larian Studios,the topic being where to spend our efforts, and as typical in that conversation, I once again found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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The route to the very big RPG that will dwarf them all

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Reading this blog, you might get the impression that the only thing I deal with is the financial side of development. Yet, when you look at the credits of Larian Studios games, you’ll discover that I used to be both lead designer and programmer of games like Divine Divinity.

Me selling some of my games - every little bit helps

What happened was that in the early 2000’s, I could get away with me being in charge of most things. But as productions scaled up and teams became larger, I was forced to (very reluctantly) release several of my roles as I was doing more damage than good. My main job became that of being the one outlining the general vision, and overcoming any obstacles encountered during executing that vision.

Since it turned out that financing topped the obstacle list, I ended up focussing a lot of time on the cash aspect of the business.  But to be honest, I hate this part of the job,  it’s not the reason I founded this studio. There really are days when I say, the hell with it, I want to program again, I’m not dealing with this stuff any longer (today is one of those days :) )

But then I remember the ultimate goal, the making of “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, and I get on with it, realizing that the side-quest of finding of what Hollywood calls “Fuck-you money” is realy becoming urgent.

The problem is, every time I think we’re close to achieving that point, costs go up, and we need to find more cash, which doesn’t really help.

So, a plan was formed… Continue reading →

Who do you pay when buying a game?

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How much do you think this retailer gets when he sells one of my games?

I’ve seen some debate about some of my posts on the publishing side of the business and I noticed that a lot of people don’t understand the economics behind a game. Sadly, that includes a lot of developers too.

I’ll keep the overview very short but I think it might be helpful to have some numbers in place for future reference when I’ll discuss some of the finer aspects of royalty report manipulation I’ve seen.

So if you want to know how much you pay to who when buying a game, read on.

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How Larian ended up self-publishing

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I saw some interesting reactions to Why so many developers close their doors, here and on other sites. A fun consequence was that some guys from the Larian team approached me  voicing their concern that if I’ll actually post all the stuff I think on this topic, we’ll never manage to do any business in this industry again.

Figuring this was the perfect opportunity for me to take on my papa smurf look, I tried to calm their fears by lecturing them about our grand going independent strategy, and how it’s rooted in years of experience of talking to the “big publishers”. Read on If you want to figure out how I came to became a rebel, with plenty of reasons to shun the official prostration that goes on twice a year at events like Game Connection.

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Dragon Commander – as defined by a fan

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The Dragon Commander negotiating

One of the problems we’ve been struggling with is how to communicate what Dragon Commander is all about, given that it’s a genre-buster blending RPG, strategy and action gameplay. And suddenly, out of the blue, somebody sends me a mail that captures the feeling we’re trying to create. It was so spot on that I wanted to share it with you:

“I’m seeing a trailer of Dragon Commander that has camera zooming in on the council, with the general stamping his feet and pointing at the invasion target – then moving past to the bedroom, here’s the dragon knight kissing his wife and donning his armor – and then to the deck, with the fleet taking off – and then into the battle, into the glorious battle, where there’s almost a loss, a retreat, a re-groupment with a top-down view, – followed by victory, followed by negotiation with captured prisoners, – followed by the council again, clapping and drinking, and in the background – a wife calling to the bedroom, and a scientist eager to show new blueprints. This is what would make me buy the game.”

The pirate in me

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I’m ambivalent about the entire crusade against pirates thing. Every now and then it’s  it’s an issue that gets claimed by some publisher because of some new technology that gives them the illusion they’ll finally be able to stop it. Eventually it  boomerangs in their face, and they go hush about this issue. If they care, some poor community manager is then appointed to deal with the consumer backlash, and some other publisher pops on the scene, declaring the war on pirates, and the cycle starts all over.

These guys will find you if you copied a Divinity game !!!

And now we have CD Projekt  - first they make a lot of noise about the fact that their games are DRM  free and that publishers that enforce DRM are idiots ( DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, a fancy word for anti-piracy measures) Now the same CD Projekt makes it back into the press because they hired one of those one-stop-shop lawfirms that promise to use the full force of the law to hunt down  those that make illegal copies of their games, imposing a fine which from what I heard is approximately 40 times the revenue they’d get from an ordinary sale.

As an executive having to pay my employees every month, I understand the reasoning behind wanting to maximize revenue as it costs a lot to make these games. I also understand the business logic – if only 10% of those addressed by those lawyers pay out of fear for the court, the revenue multiplication factor of 40 makes it worthwhile. And it communicates the message to the public that is susceptible to these kinds of threats that pirating their products can bring them in trouble.

But that doesn’t mean I’m pro-DRM. You see, I wouldn’t be in this industry if it wouldn’t be for the abundance of copied games I played when I was a teenager. I built up most of my gameplay instincts playing those games, and being a slow learner, it took a lot of games, some of them being very bad.

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Adios 2011, Bonjour 2012

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Every year around this time we get an onslaught of X-mas cards in our mailbox, and realize that it’d be impolite not to return fire. Artists duck as I search for a volunteer and lead artists come tell me exactly how their schedule will be affected if I dare draft someone for  X-mas card duty,  yet each year I manage to find a new victim. This year, surprisingly, it was a Larian veteran who managed to get the job – you would think he’d know all the evasive maneuvers by now – but somehow he got cornered and was offered two options – do it or do it. Being a veteran, he did it quite fast however, and so well that I think he’ll be allowed a second term next year ;)

This is going to be my last post for the year as I’m off for a holiday together with my family, but before going, here’s a bit of musings about how 2011 treated my studio & me.

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The cost of dialogue in games

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I’m sitting with an egg. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it’s a popular Flemish expression for ‘something’s bothering me’. We say – “ik zet met een ei”

The egg of it is that we’ve been making some fuzz about all the choices and consequences in Dragon Commander.  Right now however, all these choices & consequences only exist as text. And now we need to find a cost-effective way of translating all that text into animated dialogue.

Obviously, we also want whatever dialogue animation we put in the game to be as good as possible, so everybody’s saying – have you seen LA Noire ? And I say, yeah I’ve seen it.

Then I think of Divinity II -the Ego Draconis part, remembering that the voice recordings, lip-synchronization and associated dialogue animations required an intense piece of work, so I ask Benoit, the producer who was responsible for that , exactly how much voice did we have ?

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