PC Gamer - March 2012

talking

It’s hard to find a gaming forum that doesn’t contain a rant about the lack of innovation in gaming. These rants are usually aimed at the big publishers, which are rumored to have bouts of hypothermia whenever they’re confronted with a new idea. The bad news is that these rants aren’t completely off the mark. The good news is that you can help fix this.

In general, the majority of publishers do care about gaming. However, if you put all of the employees together in one big room and called it a “green-light meeting” where they needed to approve a really cool new concept, you’d have jinxed it: before you could say $, they’d all take the no-risk route and professionally shoot down whatever novel idea was presented to them.

Why would they do this? Simple—a collective fear of being responsible for anything that could in hindsight be called a failure. After all, innovation may be cool, but job security is even cooler. So they resort to things they know will work, which is more of the same, with bigger budgets (the Call of Duty series is a good example).

Game X because they lack the funding to finance their Own_Cool_Thing™. But give them access to the piles of cash generated annually by the gaming industry, and proof will be given that innovation not only generates more fun, but also more revenue.

To achieve such a reality, independent developers need to play catch up with the established publishers. Fueled by years of revenue earned on the backs of developers, seven and even eight-digit productions are now being made. This has created a pattern of expectation among players in terms of production quality. If independent developers truly want to take the pole position, they’ll need to achieve the same level of pro-

man
Devs must find a way
to access revenue
from their games.

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duction values, otherwise they’ll be unable to reach the same audience-level AAA productions currently enjoy. Additionally, they need to find room for failure, or they won’t be able to exercise their creativity fully.

For that, it’s imperative that developers find a way to access the revenue generated by their games without trading their rights away (which is what got them in the gutter in the first place).

Swen Vincke is the head of Larian Studios.

He still plays Ultima
VII, adores Terry
Pratchett and hates
boring. His secret
dream is to create an
RPG that will dwarf
them all. Recently, he
developed an
obsession for
organometallic
chemistry.

The route to better fun

It’s a situation that’s all too familiar to other creative industries. For decades, developers, often consumed by their own idealism and not knowing how to market their own games, allowed others to benefit from their work. This resulted in a creative industry where the majority of a game’s decisions are made by non-creatives, and the introduction of new ideas is dependent on the public getting fed up with the old ideas, a short-sighted approach that leads to market self-destruction of the type we witnessed, for instance, with the RTS genre in the 1990s.

That’s why the advent of digital distribution and the complementary rise of the indie scene hold such promise. Most developers only work on the clone of

A digital fix

Direct digital sales are the answer. To help appreciate this, here’s a (simplified) example from the real world: a small console game with a development budget of $2 million sold 500,000 units. The total publisher profit was over $10 million, with the developer not getting a single penny due to some creative legalese. Since all the developer’s money evaporated from making the game, he then started to work on another game, on the same terms with the same publisher.

Now imagine that this had been a PC game doing the same numbers digitally. Instead of getting nothing, this developer could’ve earned $10 million if all his sales went through digital platforms such as Steam and/or Impulse, and up to $20 million if all of his money was earned through his own digital store.

With this surplus of funds, he could then create the game of his dreams with AAA production values. Given the opportunity, you can bet that most developers would take the risk (that’s how our mindset works). And this game might then become the next big thing—the game that would never get the green light at a major publisher; the game you already want to play without even knowing it yet. Therefore, to ensure the future of innovation, buying a game digitally is the best investment you can make. n