Christian Svensson - Part One
Capcom's VP of business development talks about the company's Westward-facing development strategy
In the past few years Capcom has been strong in its determination to appeal to global markets by working with Western developers on a range of projects, from Bionic Commando with GRiN to Flock with Proper Games.
At the recent Animfx NZ event in New Zealand Lucy O'Brien caught up with Christian Svensson, the company's VP of strategic planning and business development, to get an update on the publisher's ambitions.
As a company we're trying to do increasingly what our COO calls "multi-use applications" of our properties and projects. So if you look at our efforts in the motion picture space, we’ve made several pictures - both good and bad!
Resident Evil is Sony Pictures' second most profitable franchise behind Spiderman. We've had two Street Fighter outings. Lost Planet is a major motion picture coming from Avi Arad - responsible for the Spiderman, X-Men and Iron Man series. Big, big budget films, and we have several other projects in the works, some of which will be announced before the end of this year.
So Animfx, as far as playing a role in sharing and exposing what we're doing with a different audience than we normally talk to, is important. In terms of getting some understanding as to what’s happening with digital efforts and digital film, it's very important, because this is not an audience we usually get to engage in.
Our guys in Japan would very rarely get to sit down with the guys at Weta, but what's funny is that we have a lot in common in terms of how we work. We have very similar tools, they get to do things over 15 pass renders in two days on a render farm, we're doing things at 60 frames a second. But at the end of the day we're creating digital content.
Sidhe is the largest game developer in New Zealand, and those guys have been really active in evangelising the Kiwi development scene, not just here, but in showing the rest of the world in what's happening in New Zealand and how it's relevant to our business globally.
While Weta is the big very obvious monster in terms of visual effects down here, I think there are a lot of other interesting smaller things that - if they aren't forces now - will be in the future.
I can't think of a riskier business today than being a one-team game developer shop, especially in today's climate with funding becoming increasingly difficult, and publishers becoming increasingly risk-adverse, given the pummelling some of them have taken over the last 18-24 months.
The biggest pitfall is getting signed, and once you get signed, how do you get that project through to completion? There are lots of projects that get killed along the way; production doesn't go smoothly, it's unfortunate. If you're a one-team shop and you're going from milestone to milestone, and all of a sudden that project is gone, there's a really high likelihood that your shop is gone too.
It's a really difficult business, it takes incredible persistence and great execution so you can build up your reputation and get your next gig. Not just a reputation either, but a relationship with someone you're working with.
In an ideal world, both for a publisher and a developer, if a project goes well, you do another one together. You know how they work, they know how you work, you've come out the other end and hopefully there's been some profit, some royalties for those developers to build up a bit of a war chest.
But it's really hard to get to that point, and there's not an easy transition between milestones. Having sat in hundreds of pitch meetings, there are a million very easily avoidable traps developers walk into constantly. They don't know what the publishers' 'hot buttons' are, why they're sensitive about certain things and not others.
It's a funny thing, because the developers are focused solely on the game, and the deal is only partially about the game. The other part of the deal is who the developers are and what they bring to the table. Oftentimes it's much - if not more - about them than their game.
The really good game developers treat the game business as a business, they have to figure out what their burn rates are going to be, they have to make sure that they're not over-extending themselves or putting too much of their own money in the game in the event that it falls through.
Capitalisation for publishers and developers is a very key thing, and like I said, publishers in the last 18-24 months have not been generating the returns they'd hoped for. Well, most haven't. They see a lot of red ink at EA and SEGA, and there have been disappointing returns elsewhere. You could probably count on one hand the number of publishers - thankfully Capcom is one of them - who are actually fairly profitable and stable and doing rather well.
That's not healthy for the ecosystem as a whole, if there are only five publishers doing well and the rest are underwater. These guys have to fund products that are profitable. At the end of the day, the game that gets brought to them needs to have an opportunity to make a return for the publisher, so the developer can benefit on the royalty side.