GameCentral talks to the creator of Oddworld, gains insight into games industry
metro.co.uk
metro.co.uk
The parent company was 'retooling the royalty structure' for well over a year, even had people come from corporate to tell us the progress of said monetary division. Meanwhile we worked a forced six month crunch, 5-6 days a week - most of those twelve hour days, on the first game and were in the middle of the same for the rushed out sequel.
Said parent company no longer exists.
*Just as an aside, during said royalty meeting they made note of how the money they were spending on food each night was being deducted from our eventual royalties. :)
Instead of OT your hourly rate goes to $1.25/hr and your quality of life goes out the door as you amass weight and no time for yourself, or activity. My first year in the industry I gained (no exaggeration) 50lbs.
Funny part of this story, because I refused to eat the meals served for the team, and went out for something more healthy, I was ostracized at the above company.
Long ago I found myself working every weekend at a new job - a place which subjected me to hours of grilling interviews by multiple people.
I got hurt in training one evening, came to work the next day and scheduled less than half a day off to see a doctor the following week.
I was told after the fact that I would have to take 'leave without pay' for the time - despite working 50+ hours for the week.
If not for certain obligations I'd have lost it on the spot. I ended up leaving soon after for a far better deal.
I took that whole experience as a valuable lesson in self-worth, the value of my time and how to treat interviewing and employers in the future - as an equal.
I was responding to a comment that was humorously self-deprecating, and I thought my response's satiric tone was clear.
I'm sorry if you or anyone else perceived it as a personal attack.
Also, it's a personal attack to satirically compare someone to a vampire, but it's okay to compare someone to a lamprey? Is there some list of blood-sucking creatures I can refer to, which indicates which ones you will consider a personal attack, and which ones you will not? Mosquitoes? Ticks? Patent trolls? :-)
Is satire allowed? Sure, of course. But fluff humor tends to get downvoted, since it mostly leads to more fluff humor, which takes threads off topic. Fluff humor isn't bad in itself, but it's bad when it obscures high-quality content.
I kind of wish I had a "parenthetical comment" option. "This is not on topic, but if someone else feels like looking into the parentheticals, they can turn them on."
Then again, isn't that what reddit was invented for? :-)
Have a pleasant, fun, and engaging day!
The satire thing is a separate issue. To anyone who reads as many toxic HN comments as I do, the satire in that comment was anything but obvious. It's not even close to the worst stuff HN users say to each other.
The implication in your comment and the root comment is that moderators shouldn't make mistakes. That's too high a bar. We make mistakes all the time. That's why I picked this username!
Ruthless does not mean amoral. And amoung the philisophically iliterate "How to Make Friends and Influence People" can amount to nothing more then patronage and polite cover for knives.
Carry your stick publicly if you want your opponent to be forced into showing their nature. The just ruthless are comfortable in the light of scruteny. They are comfortable with accountability and will stand for their actions.
It is never just business. It is the definition of a social order and cowards love to cover themselves in niceties.
In the case of Oddworld, they had a publisher. They were given an advance or budget to make the game. There was likely some royalty structure in place for revenue exceeding cost. Sounds like the costs were trumped up to avoid paying royalties.
The difference would be that Oddworld had a business contract stipulating this royalty structure. Did you have a contract stipulating profit sharing?
The music industry also has royalties on how much a song is played and how many copies of the albums are sold. It's frequently gamed by the studios to pay very little by citing "costs associated with the distribution and recording".
I had an interview at one such place last week. The discarded pizza boxes were stacked at least eight high.
Further, the rise of channels where you can recoup the majority of the incoming money is more helpful than this thread has yet shown, I think. When you're making pretty much all the money, you can use the income from your first game to start making a second. If your deal with a publisher was that you could make the first one and are given only just barely enough to survive, you're not making a second one, except of course on the exact same terms, never permitting you enough to leave the plantation (or at least that's the goal).
Of course, you still have to make that first one, but, well, here we run into the cold hard reality that nobody owes a developer the money to make their first game. So, yeah, bootstrapping is going to be hard and take some hustle, but at least the hustle required is now closer to the fundamental amount of hustle required, instead of being artificially added to by a gatekeeper standing in the way. I can't guarantee success, in fact I can offer you "probable failure", but at least now you've got a fair shot.
Crowdfunding seemed like a great solution to the publisher funding model, and it has proven to be a great gain for consumers in some exceptional cases (see: Prison Architect, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Annihilation, etc).
But it's also rightly lost a great deal of consumer confidence now that we're seeing a lot of crowdfunded games burn out, crash, or just plain fail to ship anything resembling the original promise (see: Takedown, H1Z1). The problem is substantial enough that Valve has basically disclaimed their responsibility if an Early Access game just absconds with your money.
IMO the next year or two is going to be critical for crowdfunding. The whole concept launched with great consumer enthusiasm, but that's fading now that the high-profile failures and scams are emerging.
Is crowdfunding going to generally succeed in more-or-less the way I outlined? Yes. Even if Kickstarter totally fails, something else will tweak the model until it succeeds. It's just a straight-up simple disintermediation-and-aggregation play; it's virtually impossible that there exist no viable solutions in this space.
Plus it's not the only thing; the more people who start with crowdfunding, the more little companies and groups there are to join if you're not quite ready to take the full risk yourself. And while the Hype Cycle is leading people to Crowd Fund All The Things! right now I fully expect crowdfunding to more frequently be used merely to bootstrap things, or for focused, specific reasons, rather than for everything.
The explosion has only begun.
What GP says is that digital downloads fixed the blatant imbalance of power in favor of developers.
i don't understand this.
isn't the definition of an "indie developer" a developer without a publisher?
Our local weekly did a cover story on Oddworld a few years back [0]. It paints a slightly different picture. Stranger’s Wrath was a "commercial flop" and the 5 million games sold was over a span of several years.
I don't know much about the video game industry but I think there's more to it than the Polygon story.
[0] http://www.newtimesslo.com/cover/7058/the-oddysee-exoddus-an...
I'm really curious about the full story here. Did they sue a publisher to pay them what they owned and they got paid back in their own stock?
I'm looking forward to what Oddworld does in the future, though my enthusiasm is tempered by knowing it is difficult to virtually impossible to really recreate the spark of some creative endeavour years later, especially with a different team.
Lorne Lanning (as the public face/'director') is clearly the guy everyone thinks of when it comes to Oddworld, but a lot of the magic of those games was down to the sort of decisions that occur in the seams between technology and micro-gameplay design (how the game "feels" to play second to second), which is a completely overlooked talent (Carmack has this talent in spades, but people generally only pay attention to the hardcore technical stuff) and with Oddworld that was coming from Charles Bloom, AFAICT.
1. "Oddworld creators sold 5 million copies in retail and never saw a royalty check"
So this publisher came to those fantasy circles hating on the company why they never sent him a cheque since they made probably millions from it. Even if he said himself they had all the rights to it and he agreed on contract as it was - he still was mad that he didnt got more. Instead of building business relationship, trying to release more stories for better fee he chose to hate on them.
Me myself as indie game developer I wouldn't sign contract that I am not feeling comfortable about.
I am selling all rights to my games to publishers, so I can focus on game development only. If one of the games will become next Angry Birds - oh well, I wont be hating on the company, but I would try to come out with joint deal for sequels.
I understand there could be mistake in accounting, but regarding some comments - publishers are not charity company. They are profit oriented. So if you have in your contract "you get paid $50K for exclusive rights" then you get paid $50K and nothing else.
However, it appears this was blatant theft.
Stuff like this happens regularly when you have a "publisher".
So, it really depends how things are structured. Many times royalties are reduced through arbitrary expenditures which is why its a problem.
Suppose I'm a serial killer and I kidnap you. I say "I'm going to be nice today -- I'll let you choose between dying by pistol and dying by machete. If you don't choose I'll think of something worse." You choose pistol. Am I absolved of the murder because I gave you a choice? Of course not.
Choice does not imply lack of coercion.
It is perfectly reasonable to be upset that X forced you to choose bad option Y (e.g. where X is market forces and Y is the combination of a shit salary and no equity).
Heh, they even created games that mirror their own situation.
This is a common practice in Hollywood as well. It's the reason why royalties as a percentage of net profits are called 'monkey points'. It's because you'd have to be a monkey to believe that the studio's accountants would ever allow that film to turn a profit in its official books.
In general, the accounting system works great if the distributor is also the developer (because tax) but really badly if the developer is external (because "net" is a fiction).
This is also why powerful people negotiate for a percentage of gross vs. net.
It's also how record labels do their accounting (and why most musicians make more money from touring than LP/CD/... sales).
Based on my experience (I was involved in several contract negotiations with major game publishers), of the $40 that the publisher is paid by the retailer for a $60 AAA title before it starts getting discounted, at most $14* goes to the developer (and that assumes you deliver boxed media with instructions, etc.) -- if not the publisher will be happy to deduct those costs from your $14. This is assuming the developer created the entire product on their own dime. If the publisher does QA and packaging, that's coming out of your $14.
* Probably more if you're a Brand Name. I imagine that if you've got brand recognition then, like Alec Guinness in Star Wars, you can negotiate a percentage of gross, and it's a whole different ballgame.
“I get these occasional letters from Lucasfilm saying that we regret to inform you that as Return of the Jedi has never gone into profit, we’ve got nothing to send you. Now here we’re talking about one of the biggest releases of all time,” said Prowse. “I don’t want to look like I’m bitching about it,” he said, “but on the other hand, if there’s a pot of gold somewhere that I ought to be having a share of, I would like to see it.”
http://www.slashfilm.com/lucasfilm-tells-darth-vader-that-re...
I imagine that, as someone whose face is never visible, Prowse was in an unusually poor negotiating positionand that the more recognizable leads got better deals. Alec Guinness (who got 2% of the gross of the first movie, claimed to have argued in favor of killing off his character to avoid speaking any more terrible lines, and only agreed to do the sequels if he didn't have to promote them) reportedly bought his own island with part of the proceeds (probably in an effort to avoid Star Wars fans).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petersfield,_Hampshire.
Never met him, but I think he's on record as describing those roles as ... <Googles> ... "Fairytale rubbish".
"Millions and millions of dollars of error not in our favor."
mean they owed more than they thought?
If an audit is 'in my favor' that means you made a mistake and owe me more.
If the audit is 'not in my favor' then you made a mistake and I owe you more.
I'll add that this "Hollywood" accounting is also used in the music industry.
"Now fortunately someone told us to do that, and did the same thing, and that's ultimately how we got the company back," he explained. "Because when we were able to prove that things were not what they should be then it was ‘pay us or give us the company back', very simple. And so that's how we got the company back, 100 per cent."
makes it sound like this was not the case and that they were, in fact, cheated out of royalties. The article is not completely clear, though, and awkwardly-worded at some points.
The size of that advance will depend on the size of the studio, production costs etc. - it's probably aimed purely to cover costs and the developer won't really make a profit on that - and then any future royalties would go to the developer's coffers.
However, at that point Hollywood Accounting enters the room, and the publisher will do a lot to ensure that most of the 'profit' of the game is actually written off as 'costs' to the publisher, so that they can avoid paying royalties where possible.
Fortunately there's never been a better time to go indie. More opportunities and more store fronts are accessible than ever before.
Bob talks with a game company exec.
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Abe's Oddysee was a brilliantly made 2D platform/puzzle game, and it's gameplay kind of depended on the 2D design. Personally I'm happy see a remake of the game that works the same, but looks nicer. I'd also love to see a new 3D game in the same world, but it would make more sense as a new title.