ALPHA | OPINION //COMMENT: STUDIO MANAGEMENT
Developers are from Mars, Publishers from Venus
by Tim Heaton, The Creative Assembly
have hit my expectations before. If you’re working with a 70 per cent average Metacritic team and wanting 85 per cent, you really have to understand what needs to change. The least important part of due diligence
prior to the greenlight? The high-level concept. Sure, the game needs to fit into a publisher’s portfolio, and be in a broad genre where the publisher feels it can succeed. But beyond that, successful games are all about the detailed implementation, and not the high-level concept. Most games change direction significantly during pre-production, and often in production too. There’s no point obsessing on a concept at an early stage if you’re entering a relationship where the creative staff at a developer have shown their capability previously.
Heaton’s time with EA taught him to understand the publisher-developer relationship from both sides of the divide
RELATIONSHIPS are hard. You have to work at them, be understanding, sometimes give unconditional love, and tackle difficult issues with bravery and dignity. Some are storm ; some are deep and long lasting. And that’s just the relationships between
developers and publishers. Don’t ask me about those people who inhabit your life when you’re not at work – that’s an even deeper mystery. The connection between developers and publishers is the great, largely unwritten, story of video game history. It makes the headlines sometimes when there’s a particularly nasty falling-out and it goes to court, or someone goes bust, but most of the time it’s entwined in the day-to-day way the business runs. I’ve been lucky enough to see the business from both sides. My heart is in development, but my time spent at Electronic Arts opened my eyes to understanding how publishers work, the difficult decisions they need to make, and what’s important to them. It changed my perception of how projects and relations should be managed. I don’t think things change significantly if
you’re an independent studio or owned by a publisher. In general it seems that projects are still managed in similar ways. If you’re self-publishing you’re in a different position of course, and the death of publishers has long been suggested, but I don’t see that happening. It could be argued that because of rising development costs and the difficulty in discovery across the social and mobile sectors, sugar daddies with access to investment money, and the power to build and control infrastructures and global
12 | DECEMBER 2011 / JANUARY 2012
marketing, will be as key to success as they were in the retail-only days.
SECURING INFLUENCE In dealing with a developer, the publisher’s overriding need is to feel secure. It’s often making a huge bet on the game being made, and will do everything it can for assurance that it will get what it’s paying for. Senior executives at a publisher stake their careers on projects they cannot closely control. So, obviously, a significant part of the role of the publisher is auditing the developer prior to a greenlight, and monitoring progress throughout development.
The most important and successful
strategy for a developer is to manage communications up into the higher echelons of the publisher.
It seems to me that doing due diligence on
a developer prior to a deal is really easy. It depends on one simple component: track record. I would suggest that in games development, you’re likely to get projects done at quality thresholds and delivery dates in a similar fashion to those that the key staff on the project have achieved before. Of course there are exceptions, but in a world of complex, disruptive issues, if it were my money, I’d be spending it on people who
GOING GREEN Once the game is greenlit, the day-to-day relationship is all about trust, hitting milestones, communicating issues and demonstrating an understanding of the objectives. In addition, the most important and successful strategy for a developer is to manage communications up into the higher echelons of the publisher. Week-to-week communications often happen with a ‘publishing producer’, who then reports back up the organisation. But usually publishers will also have internal review sessions, often quarterly, where the real decision-makers at the company want to see and hear that their big bets will pay off. These are a huge opportunity, and should be taken very seriously. If it’s not quarterly reviews it may be ‘royal visits’, when the publishing chiefs visit, or specific milestones that will be reviewed at a high level. These reviews need to create a buzz. The
internal excitement at a publisher about a game is vital, and it’s importance often underestimated. All the best staff want to be associated with a success, and in these days of focused portfolios, marketing support will evaporate if there’s no will for it to succeed. If you have heads of marketing and production leaving a meeting going ‘Wow, it looked really good’, and then sitting on a plane with the CEO saying the same thing, you’ve succeeded. There’s a lot more to say about good
practice between developers and publishers, so hopefully it’s a topic to come back to soon. But try not to disappoint or fall out with your publisher – currently, in games development, there really aren’t plenty more fish in the sea.
Tim Heaton is studio director at The Creative Assembly, the UK-founded studio behind the acclaimed Total War series of PC games, as well as numerous other works including original and licensed products.
www.creative-assembly.co.uk
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76