Jenova Chen: How Journey’s creator went bankrupt and won game of the year | Hacker News Reader

Jenova Chen: How Journey’s creator went bankrupt and won game of the year

venturebeat.com

46 pointspeacewise35 comments

>Journey went on to become the best-selling PlayStation Network game of all time. Chen doesn’t know for sure, but presumably it will earn royalties.

I'm sorry. I can't parse this statement. It's the best-selling PSN game of all time, but they don't know if they'll even make royalties for sure?

Look at all the musicians that have wound up actually owing companies like Sony money despite having a platinum album.

I can easily believe it.

Thatgamecompany was under contract with Sony to produce three titles, of which Journey was the last. One can only assume that they had already been paid according to the terms of the contract. Perhaps there weren't any provisions for royalties.

As the article said, development ran long. Sony completely funded 33 months of a 10+ person team to make Journey. At $10-20 a copy, it would take a lot to break even.

Single platform games suck... I really want to play this game and yet I probably never will.

Same story with Fez on Xbox...

Same sentiment on wishing to play both, but I don't think they suck. It's all they have resources for. Have you seen the documentary on Fez in Indie Game: The Movie (2012)? It's on Netflix streaming and it is awesome. Everyone that puts their heart and soul into a game like that and get torn down but trudges ahead despite all odds should be rewarded... even if you are funded by the Canadian government: www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884

You'll see in "Indie Game" that Team Meat got kind of fucked by MSFT. Phil Fish has similar horror stories: he avoided patching a critical bug because supposedly it would have cost him $40k to recertify Fez: http://kotaku.com/5927224/fez-wont-be-fixed-because-microsof...

So, if nothing else, it seems like it sucks for the developer.

>You'll see in "Indie Game" that Team Meat got kind of fucked by MSFT.

I don't know, it seemed like MSFT giving them a hard deadline was what they really needed to actually finish the game. And the sum total of "fucked" was that the promotion for the game in the marketplace didn't go up when they expected it to, and they still had a great first day, and went on to sell great.

No, actually, they got fucked pretty hard. What you see in the movie is only about 10% of what happened -- but you are also misinterpreting what you saw in the movie, which is already pretty bad.

I assume The Witness is cross-platform (including MS platforms) and self-published?

Also, I never got to thank you personally for Braid - It plunged me into introspection and little did I know, I was exactly like Tim, a villain thinking of themselves as a hero.

At some point you consider the hardware a part of the game's price. Pretty much every system I own was bought to play a specific game.

They're one or two person shops that are lucky to get a game out for one platform a couple of years late. The only way they would be cross platform is for them to sell the rights to a bigger company which I'm sure they would consider like giving away their baby.

Actually, Fez is being ported to other (yet unnamed, but probably Steam) platforms: http://polytroncorporation.com/state-of-the-polytron

Huh, Fish was adamant in the past that he would not port it. Good to see.

Awesome!

But for Journey there's little hope. (https://getsatisfaction.com/thatgamecompany/topics/will_jour...)

I'd love to try Journey on a PC.

Seriously though, the PS3 is a no-brainer at this point of its life-cycle. Awesome Blu-ray device, Netflix, Hulu, etc and add PSN plus into the fray and you'll never pay for a game again.

From what I've read both Flow and Journey were meant in part to be tech demoes for the PS3. TheY push PS3 to the limit. The grass rendering in Flow and the sand tracks in Journey is not something that an iPad would be able to handle as gracefully, for example.

A tech demo for seven year old hardware though.

It may be 7 year old, but it has a unique architecture (cell) that the TGC games most likely take advantage of; it would likely be quite hard to replicate on other platforms.

Now that I have a startup that make games, it became shockingly clear on how easy is to create products that attract praise and still don't make any money, specially without marketing budget leverage or unethical tactics.

That's an interesting issue. I think you can make a pretty significant dent in marketing without really spending a dime, and I'd love to chat with you about it.

My background is marketing, but I'm currently in a producer role at a game company right now, and maybe I can take a look at your marketing efforts during off-hours and give you some suggestions? Feel free to reach out.

I make games for children, not something easy to market for. In fact, some of stuff that I make are not even game, more like toys.

But yes, I would with to talk more about it :)

On that note, is there a good "marketing news" site for children's games? I have an autistic son and much of the improvement in his hand-eye coordination we've seen has come because of Mario Galaxy and racing games on the iPad and I'd love to find other games he'd be interested in.

I think it would be incidentally helpful to hand you a list of these sites - in the act of helping speeder, I would be researching a list of these websites. Happy to share!

Thanks!

By the way, I would also such list ;) (I will enter in contact with Jon)

And many parents of autistic children praised both our music box app and matryoshka apps, because both require good hand and eye coordination.

(my site is www.kidoteca.com)

Thanks, will check it out better when I get home (and don't have to use IE 7 ;) )

My email and my twitter are in my profile, feel free to shoot over a quick message and we'll talk shop!

That's a tough market, but I would love to figure out some way to help you out.

Speaking about games for children, have you seen http://www.fungooms.com ? In my opinion they are the best and sadlymthe author didn't raise emough backers in kickstartermfor an iOS amd Android port.

Praise from whom? I assume critics, not users, because paying for a full version of Journey was an absolute no brainer.

There are lots of users who will praise your game without paying a cent for it (either via piracy, playing a friend's copy, or whatever).

Both.

My games for example frequently hit 4/5 or 5/5 with critics.

And my average score with users is about 4.8, also I receive lots of positive message and so on.

But people are happy to settle with free versions and not pay anything, also we have some bizarre amount of piracy even for free versions.

Journey is worth buying a used PS3 for.

I came here thinking this was about the 80's band of the same name. I am disappointed.

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