Category: business

I regularly read the ‘silicon alley insider’ web site. I have a love hate relationship with it. I do it partly to remind me how inward looking and narrow peoples focus can be. To the writers on SAI, the only big thing happening in the world is the battle between smartphone companies, and the biggest news in the universe is if a silicon valley startup orders new office chairs. It is incredibly inward-looking. As someone who doesn’t even own a ‘smart phone’ (my phone doesn’t even have a camera) and isn’t even sure where his phone is  right now, I feel like I’m watching aliens through a telescope.

What I find most awkward about that silcon-valley-mania, is the obsession with venture capital and startups. it seems there is only one possible way to be in business:

1. Start up a new company. Must be NEW! nothing older than a week, or you are yesterdays news!
2. Employ young people. They must be young. The younger the better. Nobody with any experience at all. if they are good looking, much the better!
3. Spend a fortune on flash offices and furniture. Have ‘zany’ stuff such as slides and table football in the office to show just how totally crazy you are! (Also helps scare off older people).
4. Don’t worry about making a profit. profits are for losers. Spend any money that would have been profits on a superbowl ad, especially a hip one that doesn’t even mention your product.
5. Smooth talk venture capitalists into lending you hundreds of millions of dollars, which you will spend on bonuses for the CEO and CTO, despite not earning a cent in profit yet.
6. Sell to google or facebook, and then goto 1).

This is probably a smart move, if all you want from life is money, but there is only so much money can buy. once your strategy earned you $10million, whats the point? what are you doing?I have a strategy for what to do with my life if I ever have $10 million, and it’s not about making more.

Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur schmuck because I run my company this way:

1. Make a game, using savings to finance it.
2. Make profit from sales of the game
3. Stash some aside for a rainy day
4. Make the next game, financed by last games profits.

Schmuck or not… I sleep safely at night knowing positech is 100% privately owned and 100% debt free and influence-free. No bank, no investor, no business partner can turn the lights off tomorrow. In an increasingly debt-laden world, with every possibility of future economic wobbles and debt-financing squeezes, maybe I’m not the dumb schmuck plodding along, but the wiley old tortoise who will still be here after the startup kids are locked out the office because the creditors demand their money back?

Ha! who am I kidding, I bet lots of them sleep on a pile of gold on their own private islands already :D

Today marks the launch of the first Show Me The Sales promotion. This is a big bunch of high quality indie games all being sold at a discount. it’s not like a normal games bundle, where there is a central seller taking a cut, and you have all-or-nothing. It’s essentially a collection of indie games sold direct by the developer, which are all on sale at the same time. Plus every one has handy videos:

http://www.showmethegames.com/sales.php

This is my little side project, and is a way to encourage indie pc devs to sell direct, and for gamers to remember what it’s like to buy direct. It’s really no hassle at all, and you get the satisfaction of ALL of the money going to the developer.

Anyone who is suspicious and thinks I must be making money from it somehow, I’m not. I see it as being in my long term indirect self-interest to maintain a healthy direct sales channel for indie developers. That’s all.

Please tell your friends, there are some great games there at great prices, and it’s only lasting 14 days.

A recent conversation with a fellow indie about their first game, and it’s (relatively) low sales led me to think about how best a small games company should break out of a ‘cheap games and low sales’ rut.

GSB took way more effort to make than any of my earlier games. It was a bit of a big gamble for me, but it paid off. I don’t have exact figures to hand, but I’m pretty sure that the return-on-investment per hour of dev time for GSB is higher than for my earlier games. That makes me think if this might generally be a good rule to follow.

It’s easy to get stuck into an assumption that there is simple  linear mapping between effort and reward, but I’m pretty sure that’s not true in game development. Very big smart companies don’t seem that keen to work on lots of small projects. Call of Duty X is always a huge stupidly expensive project, and the profits from it are always staggering. Nobody ever thinks ‘hey maybe spending >$30,000,000 on a game is a bit crazy, why not do two $15,000,000 games?’. I suspect that is because the profit on the one 30mill game is bigger than the profit on two 15mill games.

So for indies, I’m wondering if we should take a leaf out of valves book. Team Fortress 2 took 7 years to make. Half life 2 cost a fortune (at the time) but then sold 12 million copies. Maybe indies should be spending more in time, money and effort and taking much bigger risks in scope if they want to make a decent return.

GTB will definitely have higher production values than GSB. I thought GSB seemed pretty good, but some bits could have been better. I’m aiming for more polish, and a more impressive initial release. If that means it takes an extra 3-6 months, then I’ll do it, but I still hope to release in 2011, if I knuckle down to it :D

I know that there are a lot of games companies that release sequels which, we all shout and complain, are just a re-hash of the previous game, but I wonder if they aren’t missing a bit of a trick here.

Everyone moans that TIE fighter was awesome and we don’t get a sequel. Ditto syndicate. Ditto all sorts of games. I always enjoyed Age Of Empires II.  Also Thief 2.

The problem is, big companies are obsessed with re-doing EVERYTHING and then charging full price as a sequel. I suspect there is a mid-market opportunity.

Lets say lucasarts took TIE Fighter, redid all the textures so they were higher res, re-did the models to be higher poly, and made the game play nice under directx9 on windows 64 bit etc, then re-released the game as a special edition for $10. Would people buy it? Would it pay for the art costs of doing so? I strongly suspect it would.

The trouble is, the big huge mega corps that control those old classics are simply not wired internally to do this. They either spend $10,000,000 on a game and expect a $100,000,000 return, or they do nothing. The fact that they have some old IP and an old (but classic) game design, where they could spend $200,000 to make $600,000 just doesn’t compute. It doesn’t fit their plan, marketing, financial or otherwise.

I’d like to think some canny executive at those companies could see that if they just sold the rights to re-release an updated, re-skinned TIE-fighter/Thief/insertnamehere, they could make a nice easy chunk of change, but I won’t hold my breath,

Bad idea? Good idea?

(I know GOG games make old stuff run on modern operating systems, but they don’t update the graphics in the way I suggest).