Before we begin, I’d like to welcome back our best-est buddy Erin Siegel,
who knowing full well how much work and is involved in making one of these episodes,
keeps saying yes every time we ask for her help. Always a pleasure, you brave, brave soul.
So, about eight months—EIGHT MONTHS, really? WOW…. Ok, so eight months ago,
we announced that we were going to start an indie publisher with the funds we raised on rocket hub
in order to test our theory that the publisher-developer relationship could be more equitable
and still keep a publisher in business. So today, we thought we’d talk about how that’s been going.
First, let me tell you: turns out, it’s a lot easier to say ‘hey, why don’t we start a publisher’
than it is to actually make that happen.
Some of you have probably been wondering why we haven’t had much to report so far? That is why.
For most of the last eight months, we’ve been wading through all the legal work to get this thing set up properly.
Normally wouldn’t take that long, but when you’ve got to juggle it alongside day jobs and a weekly show…
well, you can imagine. But we’ve pretty much gotten at the end of that stage, at least for right now,
so yaaaaay, we’re publishers! Almost. Kind of.
Now we come to the next big challenge: finding the right game to publish.
One might think that this would be an easier task, but (in our opinion) one of the main reasons that publishers fail
is because they greenlight the wrong projects. I mean, all of you can probably think of a few examples of games
that made you go “what were they thinking” when you saw them, games that probably cost them
tens of millions of dollars when, even as a consumer with no industry experience, you could see it was a terrible idea.
In our opinion, this is because publishers often look at the wrong things.
Very often they’ll look at what types of games have been popular recently rather than why those games were popular.
We saw it happen with MMOs when everyone hopped on the WoW bandwagon without delivering the same level of polish.
We’ve seen it with first person shooters, heck we even saw it with third person action games after God of War happened.
The games that make a billion dollars in these genres made a billion dollars not because
they were part of a specific genre but because they had something special to them.
This is what a publisher should be looking for, not just the right buzzwords.
On the other side, publishers also often place a lot of emphasis on the viability of the team.
Making a videogame is an incredibly complex thing and, in the end, more game projects fail than succeed,
so there is a great deal of emphasis put on whether the team proposing a project looks like
it’s actually capable of getting that project out the door.
Now, that is a completely reasonable thing for a publisher to do, and we intend to do a bit of it too.
But our ultimate goal is to see if there’s any way we can break the cycle of
only funding people with a few major projects under their belt.
To that end, we plan to move very slowly and carefully. Like I’ve said before, we want to start this thing off right.
While we’re 100% behind what Kickstarter has done for game funding, and even spent an entire episode
saying how great it is that this new model exists,
in some ways I’m a bit amazed out how cavalierly people seem to be taking it.
Wonderful as crowdfunding is, the harsh reality exists that many of the projects people have funded
may never actually get released.
When it comes to game development, a lot can go wrong. So we want to be smart about this.
We’re determined to find the right fit for our first few projects.
We don’t want to waste any of the money you guys put in, and if it takes a few years to find the right game,
then so be it.
I’m not saying this is likely to take anywhere near that long,
I’m just trying to stress how seriously we’re taking this.
This is also why we’ve only done a single Rockethub thing for this so far.
Many of you have asked if we plan to run another one sometime and the answer is "maybe,
but only once we’re confident that things are off to a strong start”. At this point,
we have roughly $50,000 from Rockethub money, plus another few thousand we put in.
In the world of game publishing that… well it’s practically nothing,
but I think it’s enough to get one or two small projects off the ground.
Right now, we’re primarily looking at games which could be released for 20-30 thousand dollars.
This probably means platformers, top down shooters and, maybe, turn based strategy games…
I mean, it could be anything, but we’re only looking at projects that are convincingly viable on such a small budget.
So, how do we choose what games to look at? Well, we’ve been debating this one for a while.
Right now, we don’t have the scheduling bandwidth to assess every game that might come through the door
if we were to do open submissions, much less the ability to scrutinize
every team that approaches us with a solid game idea.
So, for now, we’re keeping things limited to projects that we see at conventions,
or whose teams talk to us directly, either by knowing us through work or catching up to us at a trade show.
As for the minimum bar for consideration: at that point, we’re keeping the rule pretty simple: no demo, no discussion.
I know that may sound pretty limiting, but in our time in this industry we’ve seen a hundred ideas
that looked good on paper amount to nothing,
and we’ve met thousands of people with an ‘idea they’d like to turn into a game’.
We need to see that people have the commitment it takes to really make a game and
we need to get our hands on the game and understand how it plays before
we’d even consider spending the money you guys put in to fund it.
We’ll try to keep you guys up to speed through our website, facebook feed and twitter account
every time we have news or updates, and we may even do an episode like this every six-ish months or so
just to keep everybody in the loop. If these first couple of projects go well,
hopefully we can open it up and start opening things up to a broader submission process.
I have no idea where we’ll find time for a process like that, but we’ll work on that problem when we get there.
So that’s where we are. Thanks again to everyone who made this happen.
I know a lot of you guys are eager to see this thing start moving for real…trust me, so are we.
Thanks again, Erin, for your heroism, and we’ll see you guys next week!
Subtitles: ABagOVicodin