Ruling the Roost

Gamecock Media Group was established in February 2007 by former Gathering of Developers executives, including Harry Miller - or to give him his official title, "el presidente".

From the start Gamecock appeared keen to make an impression, accusing the major publishers of placing too much emphasis on "safe bets". Gamecock pledged to redress the balance by focusing on independent developers and original, innovative titles.

Since then, the company has signed nine games across multiple platforms - all created by independent studios, many of whom have only been recently established.

At Gamecock's "alternative E3", held during the main show but at a separate location, GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Miller to discuss how the strategy is working out so far and what he perceives as the biggest problems in the industry today.

Harry Miller: Yes, we weren't invited to E3. Why not? I haven't asked them. We weren't on the list. We kept waiting by the mailbox and nothing arrived, so we decided we had to do our own stuff.

But we're used to it, we founded Gathering of Developers a long time ago, and at each of the E3 show we had our own counter-culture activities out in the parking lot - bands, barbecues, beer and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of fun; a better bang for your buck.

We're quite new, we announced in February, and since then we've announced nine titles with multiple SKUs. It's going great - better than we expected actually, and we expected a lot, so that's good [laughs].

People ask us if we'd ever want to be a publisher, and actually we are a publisher in all forms of what a publisher is. We're more focused on independent developers; the idea of Miramax comes to mind as far as similar models go.

We have no internal development; we find independent developers who have their own IP, their own titles, we work with that and we bring their products to market.

So we help fund the titles, we do marketing, PR, sales and distribution. The developer gets full credit for the game, they keep their IP and they have a healthy royalty rate if the game's successful.

Because no one's really taking any chances right now. The industry's laden with sequels. Not that sequels are bad, you have to have them, but you also have to have new blood as well.

So right now you're seeing sequel after sequel, version five, six of titles, even more, a lot of licensed properties - and most licensed properties are crap, basically. It's just a sure bet they can make some money and they don't put much effort into making a quality effort.

It makes for a stagnant industry, and this is the games industry - it should be fun, it's entertainment, and a lot of that's taken out of the equation.

A lot of people kind of look at our games and go, 'That's kind of weird,' but when they see them come to fruition, people realise it makes a lot of sense - and they're excited about what's coming out.

It's not just qualities in the game, but qualities in the developer as well. Not just past experience but do they have a passion, do they have a clear view of where they want to go with that passion?

Ideas are a dime a dozen if not cheaper - it's whether you can execute on those ideas that's most important. So it's a mixture of things - the game, the platform, the idea, the developer.

Raising money is always the toughest challenge, and getting that out of the way was nice. When we formed Gathering of Developers it was always a challenge, we started with zero money and a lot of hot air. This time around it's been different, it's allowed us to focus on doing our job and not so much on where the next paycheck's going to come from.

Beyond that, there are no great hurdles this time. We're also in our honeymoon period - no titles have shipped yet - so on the financial side of it we look at our projections and go, 'Oh, things look fantastic. We are great.' When we start shipping we'll find out if that's true or not.

We have a couple of titles shipping this fall, and then in '08 it goes forward. But that's the thing about games, you can't just start up and then start selling, because content takes time.

I was over there earlier, and now I'm over here... I haven't really thought about where I'm going next...

Oh, okay... We sold Gathering of Developers to Take-Two, and we sold it earlier than we wanted to sell it. Now we have a vision of how the industry should be and how we want to be part of it, and we want to see that happen - a broader reach, more titles.

It's really about growing a little bit. If we're doing nine titles now, does that mean we're going to ship 12, 15 titles a year at some point? It's really affecting our business plan in the sense of what we want to accomplish.

One of our goals is to make sure we're profitable - as long as we're profitable, we can stay in business. Secondly, it's making compelling content that we enjoy playing, customers enjoy playing, that really adds to the shelf as far as games to play go.

That's where we want to be, and the more we can do that the more we can help independent developers stay in business, thrive and be noticed as independent developers. That's success for us.

Harry Miller is the president of Gamecock. Interview by Ellie Gibson.