Revolution's Charles Cecil
The Broken Sword creator muses on the digital games industry and how quickly it's changing
The videogames business is undeniably the fastest-changing entertainment medium there is - and more recently, coupled with the seachange that the internet has brought upon society that rapid pace has only accelerated.
Digital- and self-publishing is one of the more recent business trends to hit the industry - but even in the past 18 months the skies of opportunity have begun to cloud over. We spoke with Revolution MD Charles Cecil about how the land now lies, as well as finding out how his recent digital titles - Broken Sword and Beneath a Steel Sky - have been getting on.
Yes - when we last met I talked about how Revolution needed to reinvent itself, but also the opportunities we had to do so. At that point the Wii and DS versions of Broken Sword had just launched, published by Ubisoft - and we were developing that and Steel Sky for iPhone.
Steel Sky got fantastic reviews - it sold about 60,000 units, which was very respectable. Broken Sword got really good reviews, and though it only launched towards the end of January, six weeks later we'd sold about 100,000.
I guess for a big company, that's chicken-feed, but for a company with no overheads, that's fantastic. We have the opportunity to create Broken Sword: Director's Cut on PC - and what's particularly interesting, what I really love, is that instead of just being the developer with this idea that we're greater than the publisher, nowadays our relationship with the publisher is better than it ever has been.
Because the grail is to be able to self-fund, take all the risk away from the publisher and be able to work with them where appropriate. For example, Revolution's got a good name in the UK, and in Germany - but what I've discovered is that we need a really strong German presence. So if we work with a German publisher on our titles, and there's no risk, then everybody wins.
The irony is that actually there's plenty of scope for a great relationship with a publisher. We worked very well with Ubisoft, it was very enjoyable, and I hope they'd say the same of us - and they brought an awful lot to the project. I was very touched - Alain [Corre, Ubisoft EMEA MD] sent me an email congratulating us on the success.
Generally I'd like to think that I've had a very good relationship with most of the publishers that we worked with. We have had some nightmare examples, but generally I've enjoyed it - and as we go forward we'll continue. But they always say that if they take all the risk, they should get the lion's share of the reward... and it's hard to argue with that.
However, if we put ourselves in the position where we're taking much more of the risk, conversely we should have a much more equitable relationship. That's really where I see us going forward.
When I first started out it was with a company called Arctic Computing, then I went to work with US Gold, and then Activision - so I learned a lot about the publishing perspective before I founded Revolution in 1990. So I try wherever possible to look at things from a publisher's perspective, and also to learn.
In a mainstream release you obviously have to create a story, so you think about how you can make it an event. The interesting thing is that we're in a bit of a grey area with iPhone, because a publisher would never consider that it's worth putting the effort and cost into creating that event, whereas for us it was absolutely worthwhile.
Our budget was very modest - a few thousand pounds. We created a video as a presentation, and used Premier PR, who were great, for a short time as well. I happened to be in the Apple Store in London, and talked to the manager there and asked if he'd like to do a Broken Sword event - his reply was that Robbie Williams was in the previous week, the Vampire Diaries cast was in the week after, so Broken Sword would fit very well the week after that...
So we did an event at the Apple Store, and that was fantastic, because there was a certain amount of symmetry in all of it - our relationship with Apple is very good, and they've been very supportive.