The Business Side of Video (Space) Games EXCLUSIVELY ON IDLE THUMBS

[Gaizokubanou]

Bungie vs the composer Marty O'Donnell is going well for Marty~

 

http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/04/ex-bungie-composer-marty-odonnell-wins-epic-legal-fight-with-former-bosses/

 

So... 20% of Bungie stock... that must be a lot?

[itsamoose]

The stock probably isn't half as valuable as it's B status. Assuming I understand the ruling correctly, he can still potentially have a significant influence at Bungie.

[Gaizokubanou]

The stock probably isn't half as valuable as it's B status. Assuming I understand the ruling correctly, he can still potentially have a significant influence at Bungie.

 

That ought to be super hostile relationship though, right?  I wonder if it's worth keeping that influence since he will likely have to constantly 'fight' to maintain it, or just cash out.

 

Like, I have no clue how Destiny is doing, what it means to Bungie's stock & future, etc. :x

[Bjorn]

So it sounds like Activision was sticking their noses pretty hard into portions of the development, and O'Donnell was one of the team pushing back against that?  I can see Activision not having much respect for a music/audio guy, and how that could really piss him off. 

[itsamoose]

That ought to be super hostile relationship though, right? I wonder if it's worth keeping that influence since he will likely have to constantly 'fight' to maintain it, or just cash out.

Like, I have no clue how Destiny is doing, what it means to Bungie's stock & future, etc. :x

I would imagine so, but it's hard to say. Class B stock is a weird phenomenon, mainly because it often sounds like a secondary preferred stock but can sometimes provide a greater influence on voting than class A stock. So 20% sounds like a lot, but without knowing the remaining ownership breakdown and voting rights it provides could mean anything from him having effectively 1/5th the voting power to next to nothing. It's possible that he could end up being a tiebreaker in the decision making process in the future, which probably scares the shit out of Activision.

[Dewar]

Ug. that story makes everyone involved look like babies.

[Bjorn]

Marty really doesn't come off at all bad to me.  Some of his behavior looks somewhat unprofessional around, but it also looks like that was in response to some pretty bullshit behavior/decisions by other people.  It also looks like he was being setup for awhile to be cut loose, and in such a way that they would be able to strip him of a bunch of money/stock/power. 

[Dewar]

The way I read it, Activation replaced the music on one trailer and drug their feet releasing his work as a stand-alone CD, then he started sabotaging marketing and being unprofessional in meetings? I mean "unprofessional" is a pretty broad term that could mean a lot of things, but it doesn't seem to me to be something worth fighting over.

[Spenny]

Airscape: The Fall of Gravity has sold 150 copies.

[Dewar]

I have not heard of that game. Apparently I have the Quicklook downloaded to my tablet to watch, but I have not yet watched it. They've also been to PAX prime, and I don't remember seeing it there. I guess publicity for an indie game is a hard thing, because it seems like they worked their ass off to get the word out.

 

Unfortunately, even if I had heard of it, it lost me at "2D action platformer." I have platformer fatigue. Maybe that's why I just walked past it at PAX?

[Patrick R]

Unfortunately, even if I had heard of it, it lost me at "2D action platformer." I have platformer fatigue. Maybe that's why I just walked past it at PAX?

 

Yeah, there was a good comment on the article that speculated that was one of the main problems.

 

Both of your spirals are predicated on the idea that the press are the key to success. They aren't, really. You can get media coverage from all angles and still not sell very many copies of your game. We got a significant amount of press with Saturday Morning RPG (lots of websites covered it, we were in 7+ print magazines including a porn mag of all things, etc.) - but at the end of the day our sales were still miserable. The press certainly weren't to blame for our failure. Moreso, it was probably hundreds of different factors that are subjective from person to person. Our next game, Breach & Clear, got significantly less press coverage but sold almost 100x better. FWIW, Breach & Clear also reviewed worse - so review scores don't even really matter all that much.

With Airscape, I can tell you immediately that your first big problem is that the game is a platformer. That's not to say people don't buy platform games anymore - they certainly do - it's just that there is too many of them (and too many of them are bad). Many people's first games are either SHMUPs, Platformers, or RPGs. RPGs rarely get finished because of their complexity - but the other two genres do end up generating a lot of really bad first-time efforts. People are skeptical of and burnt out on platformers - I'd hedge a bet that most platformers released on Steam in 2015 have sold and will sell just as poorly as yours. Don't get me wrong, your game looks great and looks far from an amateur attempt. I just think people are tired of the genre outside of a core niche that probably isn't searching for new games from developers they don't know.

In any case, thanks for sharing your experience. It's much easier for others to learn from failure than success. It's a shame GDC tends to weight their favor towards talks about success than talks about failure. We'd all be better developers if we could hear about more experiences like yours.

[itsamoose]

This might be the result of them not having any sales, or pushing those sales when they happen, or being a part of any bundles as well as the above mentioned points.  For example our game released about a week and a half ago, and we did a 40% off sale for the first week.  During that period we never sold fewer than 200 copies in a day, and each day since we haven't sold more than 50.  I don't know if it's the actual price point, or the idea that people are just more likely to buy something when they see a sales tag, but other devs I've spoken to have seen similar results.

[Dewar]

There are plenty of department stores that overprice things so they can slap a sale sticker on it in a couple of weeks. I try to not let sale prices influence me in that way, but I still fall to it occasionally. Worse is the other side of the coin, where you realize a game was 50% off last week, and thus it seems like a bad deal to buy it now.

[Justin Leego]

It's all about planning for the sales, isn't it?

[itsamoose]

To some extent I think so.  I can't speak definitively for anyone but myself, but comparing our PS4 release, we sold around 800 units on the back of a lot of press coverage and what not over the course of about a month.  Then basically nothing for a time (1-3 copies a day), and then 1400 during a 2 day sale on PS4.  In terms of platforms, what just about everyone told us has come true, in about week on steam we've sold about the same as we did in over 4 months on PS4.  I would add that I think something about the $5 price point will convince people to purchase who otherwise never would have, so a sale isn't necessarily a silver bullet.  Interestingly on our steam page we have about 3x as many people wish listing the game than purchasing it, which is another feature Xbox and PS4 need to adapt.

[Henroid]

Square announces it's releasing Final Fantasy 5, one of my favorites and few in the series I like at all, on Steam. YAY!

 

... Oh it's a port of the iOS port, nevermind.

 

I'll never understand how companies just don't know how to identify which of their works are critically acclaimed. The GBA port (technically a 'remake') of FF5 is the highly regarded version. But it got passed up on somehow.

[Twig]

The iOS port is probably infinitely easier than the GBA port, at least in terms of adding stuff like cheesemints, Steam cloud support, etc. Same thing for FF3 and FF4 (which I didn't realize were iOS ports, which themselves were originally DS ports).

 

Just talked about this in IRC, and imo they just don't care because it's such a small target audience that taking the easiest way out is the quickest way to earn an easy buck.

 

It is sad. At least FF3/4 look good, UI aside. (Well, I like the low-fidelity 3D aesthetic, I know it's not some people's bag.) But FF5 looks really really bad.

[SecretAsianMan]

Nintendo announced that Tatsumi Kimishima will succeed Iwata as the company's president.  He was previously the president of Nintendo of America until Reggie Fils-Aime took over.  He recently also served as the managing director of Nintendo, general manager of the General Affairs Division, and managing director of the human resources branch.  It remains to be seen if he'll be as public a figure as Iwata was.

 

The company is also undergoing some organizational restructuring, including naming Genyo Takeda as "technology fellow" and Shigeru Miyamoto as "creative fellow".  Nintendo's description of 'fellow' basically sounds like another name for a department head.

[Henroid]

Well at least it is someone that has been with the company a long time, kinda helps him to keep it going in the direction it has been. I mean, for the most part. I don't think Nintendo has made all the right moves over the last ten years but whatever.

[Henroid]

This is only vaguely business related, but Jonathan Blow spoke about why he decided on The Witness would be a timed-exclusive in Sony's favor.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/09/17/jonathan-blow-on-why-the-witness-is-a-sony-console-exclusive

 

In short, it's because Sony was willing to communicate with indie devs about hardware specs and Microsoft was not. In fact Microsoft specifically mentioned they had "no plans" to go into tech specs with indie devs. MS is really, really bad with their indie dev relations sometimes.

 

As an aside The Witness is coming out in January, I think on the PC as well.

[Henroid]

Konami has talked about this in the past, and it has come up again; a French report is forwarding that Konami is no longer making AAA video games. Except a soccer series.

https://www.vg247.com/2015/09/18/konami-stops-all-aaa-console-production-except-for-pes-report/

[SecretAsianMan]

There could potentially be a strike among unionized video game voice actors coming.  The SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actor's Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) is taking a vote to see if the strike will take place.  What the union wants is backend bonuses for top selling games.  That means royalties on games that sell over 2 million copies.  Other considerations include stunt pay for stressful vocal sessions, having stunt coordinators available during motion capture, and more transparency about auditions so the actors know what it is they're auditioning for.  Some of the bigger names that have voiced their support for the strike include David Hayter, Ashly Burch, Phil Lamarr, Wil Wheaton, and probably the biggest name Jennifer Hale who is in basically every game with a female voice.

[itsamoose]

I know very little about how voicework goes into games, so this might seem stupid, but what do they mean by residuals? I could understand a profit sharing agreement, which requires the game make it's money back at least, but in some cases the 2 million sale mark could mean the voice actors get some form of royalty payments when the developers don't. Also how do they plan to track the sales count? From what I gather this information is typically given voluntarily if at all.

I'd be interested in knowing how they hope to police this arrangement (assuming it goes through) given how games are constructed. It's easy to know if ABC airs a particular episode of a show, but it's pretty difficult to make this comparison to games or even get the data to make such a comparison.

[Zeusthecat]

I know very little about how voicework goes into games, so this might seem stupid, but what do they mean by residuals? I could understand a profit sharing agreement, which requires the game make it's money back at least, but in some cases the 2 million sale mark could mean the voice actors get some form of royalty payments when the developers don't. Also how do they plan to track the sales count? From what I gather this information is typically given voluntarily if at all.

I'd be interested in knowing how they hope to police this arrangement (assuming it goes through) given how games are constructed. It's easy to know if ABC airs a particular episode of a show, but it's pretty difficult to make this comparison to games or even get the data to make such a comparison.

 

Yeah, reading into it some, it does seem kind of fucked up to have a situation where voice actors in some cases would be getting bonuses where the developers who poured many magnitudes more effort into the project might get nothing.

[Henroid]

Yeah, reading into it some, it does seem kind of fucked up to have a situation where voice actors in some cases would be getting bonuses where the developers who poured many magnitudes more effort into the project might get nothing.

That's up to developers to unionize and make their demands then. The SAG is a totally separate body that is contracted in to work.

 

I have no problem with their demand by the way. Makes sense.

 

Edit - It should also be noted that what they're asking for is stuff that other similar lines of work (cartoons, TV shows, film, etc) get these things. There's strong precedent.