Going Solo

We actually started out completely wrong. The first thing we did was focus on distribution, and thought that the marketing was going to happen automatically. That works to a certain extent because we had the Divinity brand and community, but we weren't maximising the potential of what we had... We really needed to be in control of the messaging of the game and of the series.

One of the key things we did was indeed hire Sergei, who has enormous publishing experience. He was business development director of 1C, which is one of the largest publishers in Europe. We then hired dedicated PRs in different territories...and we realised we needed to feed these people; that means we hired in-house guys to make trailers, to make videos, which we're working on now. We hired website designers, so people are working on that also.

And then we're doing the business development also, sending people out to meet the distributors and talk to them, and actually the retail chains to see if we can get a direct relationship with them. Everything you would do if you were a publisher.

That's actually one of my favourite points [laughs].

So, what happens in a classic deal? You have a committee at a publisher that is going to give you a greenlight and assign you a producer for it. The producer then becomes the channel between the developer and all of the requirements of the publisher, which means he's going to have to talk to somebody in marketing, who's then going to talk to his marketing assistant, who's then going to talk to a product manager, or whatever [sighs]. Now all this stuff goes to the producer at the developer who sends the information down [to the developer], and it's like, 'We need a screenshot, we need a video trailer, we need this, we need that.'

The acquisition guys are in love with your product, and they want to do it. But then you go to the marketing room, and then the questions start

So if you look at the chain involved with putting all these things in place, there's enormous waste, and there's enormous effort and energy that needs to be put into communication. And as a boss it frustrated the hell out of me, because I could see all this money, and this money is what the developer is paying because, again, it is deducted as marketing costs. It doesn't make sense, because, ultimately, who was creating all these assets? The developer, but by the time it gets down to them there are 5 or 10 people involved.

By bringing it internally...you save on a lot of costs. Plus you also don't have the problem of different agendas; the publishing agenda can be very different from the developer agenda.

Yes, for sure. The other thing that has been frustrating in the past is that our games have the tendency, because usually we are late with development, to come out too soon. For instance, take Dragon Knight Saga versus Ego Draconis - Ego Draconis had a Metacritic average of 72, whereas Dragon Knight Saga had a Metacritic of 82. The difference between the two games is that there were improvements that we always wanted to do, and it was finished the way we wanted it to be finished. That's very important also.

For sure. I mean, we did good sales, so we're pretty happy - otherwise we wouldn't have been able to do all this. On Steam we were number one several times, we outsold Dragon Age 2 in Russia, for instance. But I think if we'd done just Dragon Knight Saga and not Ego Draconis first, we would have had a much, much better release from day one.

In the UK and the US people expect much more polish than in other territories. Our intention was to put all the polish there, but when you have to force release it you get a situation where you are unhappy, actually, you're frustrated because you've been working on something for so many years, and you don't get the satisfaction of finishing the job.

I have blogged, and I write extensively, about that particular part. I've seen that. Typically, when you make it to the greenlight committee, as they're called, the acquisition guys are in love with your product, and they want to do it. But then you go to the marketing room, and they put sales in there, they put people who don't play games in there, they put the acquisition team in there also. And then the questions start.

How sure are we that if we invest in this it is going to pay off? And then typically the safest thing to say is that we're not sure. I've seen it happen quite a few times with my games. I actually had someone from a famous publisher tell me that I should stop making games because I was never going to sell a single unit. To thank him for that I put him in my game; his name is in there, so people from the industry will recognise him.