Short Form:
What the Double Fine Adventure Project Means for the Industry
There has been a lot of talk about Double Fine’s unprecedented success with their Kickstarter project to get a point-and-click adventure funded. Well, that‘s a sentence I didn’t expect to be writing. Anyway, people are talking, and a lot of the talk is around what this means for the industry and the publisher model. These are exciting times, but there’s a danger that we’re expecting too much from this development.
Many people are saying that this might be one of the first steps in moving away from the publisher model and towards a brave new future where projects are funded according to what fans are willing to pay for in advance rather than what disinterested investors think will make a good return in the future. But there are a few things wrong with this.
First, I’m not sure that fans are always in the best position to decide what projects to fund. For example, a sequel to an already well-established franchise is bound to attract more fan interest than an original project from the same studio, even if that original project is extremely promising. Developers struggle to get publishers to sign up for original IP, too, but at least they have the chance to give those publishers a compelling financial argument.
Second, it’s not entirely clear how successful this method would be for most other studios. The category of well-liked-and-respected-industry-legends-with-a-large-fanbase-who-are-struggling-to-find-funding is rather a small one. How much funding do you think I’d get for my next game project? Correct – the answer was: “Do you make games? Oh, I’ve never heard of you. Good luck with that!”
It’s true that some larger developers may be tempted to take this route if they’re not getting a very good deal from their publisher. But despite how much a million dollars sounds, it’s not very much in game development terms. Crowd-funding is still an untested approach for raising money for a big-budget game, and nobody wants to be the first to take that risk.
It might sound like I’m trying to throw cold water over the flames of games industry revolution, but I’m not. It isn’t that people have got it completely wrong; rather it’s that some of them have got it backwards. The changes have already started, and the Double Fine Adventure project is one of a number of clues that this is happening.
The number of ways that people can get games made, and make money from their creations has exploded in recent years. The huge success of the games industry in the late 80s and 90s led to the rise of the publishing giants. The Internet has played a huge part in returning balance to proceedings, creating an environment where anyone with an idea and a will to see it through can get their game into people’s hands. Publishers will always have a role to play (and let’s not forget that not all of them are awful) but they are no longer the only game in town. This has been amply proven by the recent success of indies, the many, many pay-what-you-want bundles of 2011 and now this Kickstarter project.
It will take the bigger publishers some time to come to terms with the fact that they represent just part of the market and not the whole. But as they do, perhaps they’ll gradually reconsider whether treating games like livestock and every customer like an idiot or a criminal is such a good idea. Perhaps not – but the mere fact that these other options exist now is a damned good start.
Editorial, Short Form Tags: Double Fine, kickstarter, Publishers, weekly nuke
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I’d totally give you a tenner if you promised me a high definition download of the soundtrack for the next game.
Waaaah! Pete Stole my header image!!
The list of developers is tiny that I trust as much as Double Fine. Cave, Twisted Pixel and maybe Suda51 or Grasshopper although the last two are pushing it a bit.
@Mikular: I think the Surprised Man Kickstarter would go something like:
Uh, so we need about $150,000 so we can make this game without having to work at the same time, which sounds pretty sweet. If you pay us $50 you get the game plus a “Luxury Chocolate” we found, and any over-funding of the project will go towards mimosas. As many as necessary to make the game good.
I know this comment will go a bit long & is a bit lagging behind the times, both in ‘corporate thinking’ and in the thread itself.. But, as an indie dev, I have to disagree with your sentence, “But despite how much a million dollars sounds, it’s not very much in game development terms.”
TBH, $1M is more than plenty to make a game, (esp. when you already have the tools & software in-house). However, it isn’t near enough to fund a game _and_ the incredibly high costs of marketing, (of which costs may run more than the game itself just to ensure the game gets on retailer’s shelves).
Feel free to completely disagree with me and cite the costs of 3D modelling, animations/motion control, etc., etc (not that every game needs all this). Let’s face it.. Making games is easier than dealing with some of the corporate ****-heads and all the other time-wasters out there, that’s for sure.
We all could be game developers, in our own spare time as long as a commitment can be made and kept. Sure, starting from scratch isn’t for everybody, but, that’s why there’s crowd-sourcing, and entry-level in one of the many areas of game making (design/art assets, design/flow algorithms) and many other avenues to explore. Unless there’s some actual reason to hire an actual industry head, it isn’t necessary. After all (here it comes) they’re way overpaid and take most of the credit while the actual programmers get crumbs, and lucky to get well known, (not trying to say this is the case with the company at the focus of this particular article, just in general).
@Rifter01: indie development is a whole different story, though. Schafer isn’t of the indie spirit, he has a team of people he is responsible for paying at the end of the year. $1m sounds like a lot, but between 15-20 people to have them full time develop it is a whole different story. There’s a difference of scale between what your experience is telling you and the realities of heading up a studio, from my point of view.
Besides, marketing this game is already done and could essentially just be written out as kickstarter’s cut, right?
@Rifter01: I don’t disagree with everything you said. As someone who DOES make games in my spare time, unpaid, I know you can make all sorts of games on a budget. But the thing is, I’m one person (well, we’re two people in a team) making games just for the love of it while holding down a job. Even then, there are limits on the sorts of games we can make because I’m not a skilled animator or 3D artist, for example.
But the thing is, if you’re planning on making games for a living, you need to either have a plan for making a profit, or you need to have a means of paying everyone working on it. The more complicated the game, the more staff you are likely going to want to employ in making it. And that stuff adds up. Even if I’ve got a team of 12 (which is quite a large team in indie dev terms but a very small team in professional dev studio terms), I’m going to have to pay out hundreds of thousands in wages if I have them tied up for more than a few months. If my game has voice actors, they’ll need paying, I might need to license middleware and so on.
So it becomes easy to see how a large team spending years on a project, that cost is going to compound. That money goes REALLY quickly. It costs millions to make a big, professional production-value game with a large team long before you even get to marketing costs. There are people who manage to avoid a lot of the costs by going solo because they have a large variety of skills and don’t have a need to bring many more people in, but most of us are specialists (I’m actually kind of a generalist myself, but I still have plenty of blind spots and things I’m particularly good at)
But I think maybe that’s beside the point. I don’t really think I implied anywhere that you can’t make games without millions and millions of dollars. I was just saying that a couple of million is pretty small potatoes in whole spectrum of game development. No doubt Double Fine will find a way of using that budget quite easily.
So I’m not entirely certain what you’re trying to say… if it’s that some games don’t cost millions of dollars, then sure. But if it’s that $1M is more than plenty to make -any- game, then that’s clearly not so. I’m sure if publishers thought they could keep dev costs down that much, they’d be doing it all the time. More profit for them!
@Faye Lanks: But I disagree with what you said a little bit, too. Ha!
I think Schafer is absolutely of the indie spirit, despite running a medium-sized studio that has worked with publishers. There are practical and financial differences between running that sort of studio and a group of maybe 5-6 people of course. But what makes Double Fine and Tim Schafer ‘indie’ to me is that to my knowledge they have always fought to make the games they really want to make. Games they make because they think they ought to exist, not because they’re trying to capture a specific market. That’s probably why they haven’t traditionally had much luck with publishers.
I think that’s why breaking Double Fine into smaller teams is working out for him, too. Perhaps Double fine was never meant to be one big studio, when it could be several small studios acting as a collective.
@Peter Silk: My definition of “Indie” was entirely academic (as it seems to get harder and harder to define these guys into two categories as Indies get bigger and bigger. E.g. Is Minecraft still Indie game now that it is published in-house by a major publisher, The Indie Fund? alternatively, is Notch’s next game an Indie game fo the same reasons?) and I think they fail to be Indie because they apply to publishers first then make a game (Ideas vetted by a publisher, like rocksteady to WB and Treyarch to Acti-Bliz) and create games as a large team (something which, admittedly changing).
Looking at their portfolio, Using Tim Schafer as the lynch-pin and having three teams in maleable groups is something that is not only working for them, but entirely preferable to the make-or-break, big budget, retail endeavours of the past ten years. Psychonauts was genius and so was Brutal Legend, but it’s hardly sustainable, to both their ideas and their continued employment.
@Faye Lanks: I think it’s better to look at indie as an attitude rather than a business model. Because if you start to look at it as a business/working model then it gives you weird results (Bastion definitely seems like an indie game, but it’s published by WB.) Then again, Valve don’t need to go to publishers to get their games out there any more, and so they’re indie, but they’re also huge and they don’t operate under a business model than any other indie operates by. And there are indies who work for free in their spare time, support themselves, or work-for-hire in order to create a revenue to make the games they really want, or develop a working relationship with hardware manufacturers. There are too many models to pin it down.
@Peter Silk: My definition is this, see if you agree (I had to make sense of it this way or I’d go insane having awful arguments over whether Comic Jumper was Indie or not.)
1) Is the company a Publisher?
Yes – This company can never be Indie
No – Go to 2)
2) Is this a large company (operates on large budgets primarily or has a team of over 20 people)
Yes – eligible for “Indie-spirited,” but not and Indie developer
No- Go to 3)
3) Does the company make EXACTLY the games they want to?
Yes – This company is either Indie-spirited or Indie
No – This company may only be Indie if they have answered “Yes” in the past. If the company is a “Yes” for 2), they are neither an Indie, nor Indie spirited anymore.
Bastion counts because it is a small team and they made the game they wanted too, so it was neither vetted nor is it a large team. Valve ARE a publisher so they can never be Indie.
It may appear to be a very simplified table from your eyes, but it’s how I made sense of the situation and seems to be backed up by games reporters’ comments.
@Faye Lanks: I don’t completely agree with any of those.
1) I don’t see why whether a company is also in the business of publishing games has anything to do with whether they are an independent developer. These would be two separate parts of my business.
2) Again, I don’t see what size of company has to do with it. Most indie developers are small teams, but I don’t see anything about a small team that is inherently ‘indie’. Save that it’s easier for a small team to develop a tight working relationship which is often characteristic of indies. But even then, I’m unconvinced. And what about a company which is large, but works in several smaller teams?
3) I almost agree, but the nature of the beast is that sometimes you have to compromise, a little bit in order to get your game out. I don’t think a developer should be kicked out the indie club just because they went to a publisher, and the publisher said: okay, we’ll fund your game, but only if you make DLC for it. Or only if you change the name of the game, because we think it’s a little offensive or too similar to some other game. So I would modify 3) to be: Does the company work on the games they want to, and make reasonable efforts not to compromise their vision?
Maybe Exactly was the wrong word, there are reasonable compromises even if every other condition is perfect.
In regards to big companies with smaller teams within, they are indie-spirited. Which is no less a badge of honour in my eyes but I think it would be cheating to say Stacking and Scoregasm are equatable (although I like both)
You seriously consider Portal 2 an Indie game?
Cheating in what sense? Again, I don’t see any good reason why size of team enters into it except that smaller teams might get a bit jealous of larger teams. Which is irrelevant; it’s not a competition… I think the idea that they have to fit certain quite particular criteria in order to be counted as indie is itself a little bit non indie-spirited.
And actually, yes. Portal 2 fits any sensible criteria for an indie game. Valve are an independent studio. The fact they happen to be HUGE and self sufficient due to their publishing business makes them a very unusual indie, but I can’t think of any reason that actually makes sense when you examine it to exclude them.