Playing Dead
Playdead Studios' Dino Patti on life, Limbo and beyond
I think it's more community. There was some money used to map the business by the Danish government - they found out that there were 500 professional game developers in the business in Denmark. So that's pretty small. I think it comes from that, you always know everyone else who's making games, and you always want them to succeed too.
In Denmark, and I think all over the Nordic region, we're behind in terms of infrastructure. If you go to the UK or Canada, you leave one job to go to another. You have the press, so many things related to games where you can get a job. In Denmark we don't really have that. There's no infrastructure support. When people get fired from one place, they go to banks, to database companies. Some come back to the games industry, but we lose more than we like.
I would love to help a developer which we thought had the talent. That would probably be sometime in the future, because right now we have a lot of internal things going on. We're aiming to be even more independent than we were before, and that's expensive.
What I'm hinting at, really, is that we're investor-backed. So in that sense we're trying to become more independent. In that sense, having control of our project - people who pay for the projects are the ones controlling it. We're really aiming to use our own money, we're our best investors. We're the ones who know what we want. We want to control micro-decisions. We'll probably want to sanity check them with people but we want to have control.
Yes. For us, if we can somehow keep the creative control and the IP, then we'd probably collaborate with someone. But if they would take our freedom and creative control, we would never say yes to it. That's not where we come from.
We're really aiming to use our own money, we're our best investors. We're the ones who know what we want.
Yeah, I see it more as a distribution deal. Which I'm really happy with. It's worked out really well. They were cool to work with - lots of suggestions, but no fights. Just working out the best solutions.
But again, we paid for our own project, so it's not like they could come and say, we have money in here or pay money to have the decision forced through. So there had to be a relationship there - a publisher at any time can say, we don't want to publish your work.
I guess in my position as a CEO of an awesome company...no. [laughs] I really love my work, I love to be there and I love what we've created. It's a fantastic work environment and we've got some fantastic people. I think I'm a bit damaged because when I was younger I would have loved to work with a big publisher or studio. Now I have no-one to complain about, because it's all me.
I can complain to Arnt and he can complain to me sometimes, we run the business together, but it's really an awesome thing to be a small studio. We would like to grow, to do other stuff, bigger stuff. We'd also like to be able to do simultaneous stuff. We've got 13 people now and it's really hard to do separate things. But I think the management gets really difficult when you're 1000, 500 or even 200 people. You don't have control over the micro-decisions.
You'll maybe end up with more administration and middle management than people actually doing stuff. For us, we aim to remain a controllable size.
No. There's no reason to do it. We want to set new standards for games, we don't want to be a production house.
People would justify it with security, but development studios can be shut down really fast.
No way, it has to be a success too. Not every project has to, but I know the next one must. I'll put it another way - we'd probably need some funding for the next project.