New status update - 05/08/10 10:52 AM
I just spent two weeks of holidays with my family, taking some very necessary R&R after what has been a very intense year. During those two weeks I blocked myself from all communications with the outside world, and so I had no clue what was going on. Specifically, I had no clue that I would get back and see that plenty of people were already playing Flames Of Vengeance and the first reviews were up !
Some people in the forum expressed disbelief at that, but it really is quite simple: The last thing I did before going on a holiday was sign off on the German gold master for FOV so that printing could begin, and while I was aware they were going to be delivered to the warehouse, the best of my info was that the release date planned by the German publisher was scheduled for August 20th, time of the GamesCon in Köln. But since they got the games sooner than they expected, they figured there was no reason to let them lay in the warehouse, so they started shipping them out. Which makes sense of course.
So once I figured out that the game was out, I was obviously very curious to see what people thought of Flames Of Vengeance – there’s always a moment where your stomach becomes a knot when you release something because you know there’s plenty more you wanted to do but just didn’t have time for. Luckily for my stomach the initial reception turned out to be pretty good, better than for Ego Draconis – the team really received a morale boost when we saw the Gamestar gold award come in, given that it’s such a large and influential magazine, and we had quite a lot of fun when we saw the montage gameswelt did of their visit to our studio just before our holidays.
Warm feelings ensued and lasted for some time until cold reality knocked at the door when we started looking at the workload ahead of us – 6 other language versions of Flames of Vengeance need to be created and tested, three spoken languages together with two subtitled languages need to be crammed on one Xbox360 DVD, 7 different language versions of the Dragon Knight’s Saga need to be created, the Dragon Knight’s Saga itself needs to be finished, and we also have 4 Monkey Labs titles coming out later this year. Or in the games industry lingo, we have 18 SKU’s to deliver between here and Christmas as well as some patches, as well as plenty of PR and marketing materials. Probably we’ll have to cram in some demos in there too.
To be honest, it’s the part we all hate – it’s a lot of fun to work on creating a game during pre-production and production, it’s a lot less fun fixing the bugs in postproduction, and it’s downright hell taking care of all the various versions (I didn’t even mentioned all the digital distrubtion versions with their own installer/copy protection systems), especially if you know that a simple QA run through one set of quest solutions takes up to three weeks for one man to do, and there’s plenty of permutations, and you need to do this for all language versions, knowing that in general the first couple of passes most likely will yield too many bugs so you’ll have to redo it anyway.
Stuff like – **** I forgot to put the right publisher logo in the latest build for that country so we’ll have to rebuild it, essentially meaning that the entire version is invalidated and in theory needs to be completely retested can make you do all kinds of things a normally sane person wouldn’t do. Still, it’s part of the job, but it’s also one of those phases where it really feels like a job. Luckily, you know that there’s a moment when all those versions will be out of the door, and you’ll be able to work on your next game.
Our target date for all of this is October 15th 2010, and undoubtedly small miracles will have to be performed to get everything out in good order, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage, and I really hope I won’t have to eat those words.
Before I end this status update, I wanted to say a few words also about the bankruptcy of one of our neighbours, Playlogic, the next victim of this crisis which has been damaging our industry so heavily. I’ve lost count of the amount of developers that closed or downsized in the last year, but the number is huge, and I feel for all those guys, many whom I know, that lost their jobs, and are having a hard time finding a new one because there simply are less jobs available. We’re not talking a few jobs here, we’re talking tens of thousands of jobs. The fragmentation of the media landscape, the quality expectations from consumers and corresponding exploding development costs, second-hand games and piracy are all reasons which are being quoted, and while these are all true, one of the core issues for developers at least is very simply that invoices aren’t being paid in time when the developer was counting on those invoices being paid.
This has everything to do with our position in the game industry food chain i.e. at the bottom, and imho it’s pretty unfair. Having been in this industry for some time, I find that in general the development side is in general pretty efficient, simply because there’s a lot of economic pressure on it, yet it’s the side where the money comes last. The most upper layers, where the money comes in directly is probably the least efficient, simply because the money is available and can be used to cover up inefficiences, and I have serious issues with that inefficiency affecting so many independent developers who usually are the ones slaving day and night to bring their products to market.
It’s obviously something which is the case of all media industries, but it really is something that should change. I appreciate the work that is done by many in the publishing and distribution industry, but I also see a lot of redundant and often inefficient work being done, which doesn’t necessarily get optimized when times are tight. Rather the burden is placed on those lower in the foodchain. What I mean is that when the going gets tough, the jobs that probably contribute the least to the creation of games are the ones first protected whereas the jobs of developers of often succesful products are the ones first destroyed, just because of the direction of the money flow. In my opinion, and obviously I’m a developer, it should be the other way around.
Some developers managed to turn the tide, witness the success of Steam, and would we all have mechanisms with which we can reach consumers directly without having to go through the food chain to develop and publish our games, the slaughterhouse that has been the developer scene since 2009, would probably look quite different. Developers really could do with a high visibility portal, with high quality standards, but with very reasonable margins, to release their games directly to consumers, where the developer immediately get access to the income. It would be a welcome change to have a world wherein the creativity of a developer is not rewarded with the creativity of a legal department of a publisher that contrives various reasons not to pay the developer their share.
The typical strategy that has caused more than one independent developer to die in the last two years is pretty cynical. It basically boils down to – publisher/distributor owes a developer money. They don’t pay. The legal hassle starts, the developer finds itself in trouble because it was counting on that money. If the developer doesn’t have sufficient financial stamina to last for quite some time and pay the required legal fees (which are very high), the developer dies, the publisher doesn’t have to pay its royalties and problem solved (from the publisher point of view).
I find this obscene, and I can easily pinpoint the developers that died because of these practices, and it’s only made possible because the revenues from the sales of the game don’t arrive directly at the developer. I get sick when I see some publishers who I know engaged in these practices boast how they steered their company through difficulty times, because they did it by using illegal methods bordering on the criminal.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not the kind of thing all publishers engage in, though it’s the kind of thing you see increase in frequency when publishers are under financial stress, and for a healthy gamesindustry with healthy developers, it should be something that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. And it would’ve avoided many talented teams from going under. It would also result in better games.
The upside of all of this is that those developers that survive do so because they learn to counter these practices, and I think that inevitably it will lead to a change in relationship between developers and publishers in the coming years. It’s just a shame that so many blood will have been shed unnecessarily during the maturation process of this industry, and legal blah prevents these practices from becoming public. There really should be a website dedicated somewhere to uncovering the dirt that goes on. At least future victims of those that are prone to this behavior would be warned then.
This post turned out a bit longer than expected, but it’s an issue I carry close to my heart. I’ve seen plenty of displays of massive money waste at publishers whereas I knew some of their developers weren’t being paid, and it angered me tremendously. But I guess it’s like the conversation Joseph Heller described between David and God in his brilliant book “God Knows” - David says to God “That’s not fair” and God replies “Where stands it written that I have to be fair”
Rereading my post, I realized that this reads too much like a developer versus publisher rant, and that wasn’t really my intention. My point is that we could do with more high profile systems where the developer gets the revenue he is owed immediately, rather than it having to pass through the hands of the retailer, the distributor, the publisher before he gets it, because on the one hand, the time until which he gets the reward for his work can be so long (sometimes a year) that it can cause him to go under and on the other hand, if one of the parties in the chain is in trouble, the developer might not get his cash at all. It’s the side people in this industry seldom talk about, yet it defines very much the activities of developers around the globe. It’s why digital distribution is a blessing, but even there, all is not as it should be.
Cheers
Lar
Some people in the forum expressed disbelief at that, but it really is quite simple: The last thing I did before going on a holiday was sign off on the German gold master for FOV so that printing could begin, and while I was aware they were going to be delivered to the warehouse, the best of my info was that the release date planned by the German publisher was scheduled for August 20th, time of the GamesCon in Köln. But since they got the games sooner than they expected, they figured there was no reason to let them lay in the warehouse, so they started shipping them out. Which makes sense of course.
So once I figured out that the game was out, I was obviously very curious to see what people thought of Flames Of Vengeance – there’s always a moment where your stomach becomes a knot when you release something because you know there’s plenty more you wanted to do but just didn’t have time for. Luckily for my stomach the initial reception turned out to be pretty good, better than for Ego Draconis – the team really received a morale boost when we saw the Gamestar gold award come in, given that it’s such a large and influential magazine, and we had quite a lot of fun when we saw the montage gameswelt did of their visit to our studio just before our holidays.
Warm feelings ensued and lasted for some time until cold reality knocked at the door when we started looking at the workload ahead of us – 6 other language versions of Flames of Vengeance need to be created and tested, three spoken languages together with two subtitled languages need to be crammed on one Xbox360 DVD, 7 different language versions of the Dragon Knight’s Saga need to be created, the Dragon Knight’s Saga itself needs to be finished, and we also have 4 Monkey Labs titles coming out later this year. Or in the games industry lingo, we have 18 SKU’s to deliver between here and Christmas as well as some patches, as well as plenty of PR and marketing materials. Probably we’ll have to cram in some demos in there too.
To be honest, it’s the part we all hate – it’s a lot of fun to work on creating a game during pre-production and production, it’s a lot less fun fixing the bugs in postproduction, and it’s downright hell taking care of all the various versions (I didn’t even mentioned all the digital distrubtion versions with their own installer/copy protection systems), especially if you know that a simple QA run through one set of quest solutions takes up to three weeks for one man to do, and there’s plenty of permutations, and you need to do this for all language versions, knowing that in general the first couple of passes most likely will yield too many bugs so you’ll have to redo it anyway.
Stuff like – **** I forgot to put the right publisher logo in the latest build for that country so we’ll have to rebuild it, essentially meaning that the entire version is invalidated and in theory needs to be completely retested can make you do all kinds of things a normally sane person wouldn’t do. Still, it’s part of the job, but it’s also one of those phases where it really feels like a job. Luckily, you know that there’s a moment when all those versions will be out of the door, and you’ll be able to work on your next game.
Our target date for all of this is October 15th 2010, and undoubtedly small miracles will have to be performed to get everything out in good order, but I’m optimistic that we’ll manage, and I really hope I won’t have to eat those words.
Before I end this status update, I wanted to say a few words also about the bankruptcy of one of our neighbours, Playlogic, the next victim of this crisis which has been damaging our industry so heavily. I’ve lost count of the amount of developers that closed or downsized in the last year, but the number is huge, and I feel for all those guys, many whom I know, that lost their jobs, and are having a hard time finding a new one because there simply are less jobs available. We’re not talking a few jobs here, we’re talking tens of thousands of jobs. The fragmentation of the media landscape, the quality expectations from consumers and corresponding exploding development costs, second-hand games and piracy are all reasons which are being quoted, and while these are all true, one of the core issues for developers at least is very simply that invoices aren’t being paid in time when the developer was counting on those invoices being paid.
This has everything to do with our position in the game industry food chain i.e. at the bottom, and imho it’s pretty unfair. Having been in this industry for some time, I find that in general the development side is in general pretty efficient, simply because there’s a lot of economic pressure on it, yet it’s the side where the money comes last. The most upper layers, where the money comes in directly is probably the least efficient, simply because the money is available and can be used to cover up inefficiences, and I have serious issues with that inefficiency affecting so many independent developers who usually are the ones slaving day and night to bring their products to market.
It’s obviously something which is the case of all media industries, but it really is something that should change. I appreciate the work that is done by many in the publishing and distribution industry, but I also see a lot of redundant and often inefficient work being done, which doesn’t necessarily get optimized when times are tight. Rather the burden is placed on those lower in the foodchain. What I mean is that when the going gets tough, the jobs that probably contribute the least to the creation of games are the ones first protected whereas the jobs of developers of often succesful products are the ones first destroyed, just because of the direction of the money flow. In my opinion, and obviously I’m a developer, it should be the other way around.
Some developers managed to turn the tide, witness the success of Steam, and would we all have mechanisms with which we can reach consumers directly without having to go through the food chain to develop and publish our games, the slaughterhouse that has been the developer scene since 2009, would probably look quite different. Developers really could do with a high visibility portal, with high quality standards, but with very reasonable margins, to release their games directly to consumers, where the developer immediately get access to the income. It would be a welcome change to have a world wherein the creativity of a developer is not rewarded with the creativity of a legal department of a publisher that contrives various reasons not to pay the developer their share.
The typical strategy that has caused more than one independent developer to die in the last two years is pretty cynical. It basically boils down to – publisher/distributor owes a developer money. They don’t pay. The legal hassle starts, the developer finds itself in trouble because it was counting on that money. If the developer doesn’t have sufficient financial stamina to last for quite some time and pay the required legal fees (which are very high), the developer dies, the publisher doesn’t have to pay its royalties and problem solved (from the publisher point of view).
I find this obscene, and I can easily pinpoint the developers that died because of these practices, and it’s only made possible because the revenues from the sales of the game don’t arrive directly at the developer. I get sick when I see some publishers who I know engaged in these practices boast how they steered their company through difficulty times, because they did it by using illegal methods bordering on the criminal.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not the kind of thing all publishers engage in, though it’s the kind of thing you see increase in frequency when publishers are under financial stress, and for a healthy gamesindustry with healthy developers, it should be something that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. And it would’ve avoided many talented teams from going under. It would also result in better games.
The upside of all of this is that those developers that survive do so because they learn to counter these practices, and I think that inevitably it will lead to a change in relationship between developers and publishers in the coming years. It’s just a shame that so many blood will have been shed unnecessarily during the maturation process of this industry, and legal blah prevents these practices from becoming public. There really should be a website dedicated somewhere to uncovering the dirt that goes on. At least future victims of those that are prone to this behavior would be warned then.
This post turned out a bit longer than expected, but it’s an issue I carry close to my heart. I’ve seen plenty of displays of massive money waste at publishers whereas I knew some of their developers weren’t being paid, and it angered me tremendously. But I guess it’s like the conversation Joseph Heller described between David and God in his brilliant book “God Knows” - David says to God “That’s not fair” and God replies “Where stands it written that I have to be fair”
Rereading my post, I realized that this reads too much like a developer versus publisher rant, and that wasn’t really my intention. My point is that we could do with more high profile systems where the developer gets the revenue he is owed immediately, rather than it having to pass through the hands of the retailer, the distributor, the publisher before he gets it, because on the one hand, the time until which he gets the reward for his work can be so long (sometimes a year) that it can cause him to go under and on the other hand, if one of the parties in the chain is in trouble, the developer might not get his cash at all. It’s the side people in this industry seldom talk about, yet it defines very much the activities of developers around the globe. It’s why digital distribution is a blessing, but even there, all is not as it should be.
Cheers
Lar
!! 
... that will mean you all are really big fans of the Larian games, good news for Larian !! 
