TO IP OR NOT IP Back when we last spoke with the Zordix leadership team, three months before Seelye’s appointment as CEO, the aim was to maintain the full-service capability the group had recently built up, but also increase and develop the breadth and depth of IPs needed to sustain the group during a period in which indie publishing has become ultra competitive and from which not every company is believed will survive. “Right now we’re in a situation where
we have a lot of games in the pipeline, we know exactly what we want to build in the future, but we need more actual humans to build those games.” Seelye says that while the group could look to hire 50 people that
to grow an organisation rather than the be-all-and- end-all. “It feels scary and risky to me to buy a bunch of disparate things when I don’t have a vision for how they’re going to work together. I’m not saying that it’s wrong - it’s a perfectly viable strategy for somebody
“Women should be going down an entrepreneurial path”
who’s saying, ‘Let’s buy everything in this space and see how it shakes out’. Maybe it’s the entrepreneur in me that’s about making sure that we’re making money and that everything is moving in the same direction.”
might work effectively together, finding a studio that already has the skills and capabilities - and crucially the studio management - in place, might be the better option. “That’s one way to look at it. Another one is, there’s this really interesting IP that already has a community of fans that loves it. And by bringing those guys in, we can reach our goals of becoming a much bigger own-IP and transmedia company. We could do that faster by buying that IP and bringing that community in, and then we could take advantage of all of these other capabilities that the company has. “So, either one would work. It’s just like, what are
we talking about at the time? We’re also of a size as a company right now that doing five acquisitions a year is not within our capability set today. We just don’t have the internal resources to do that. So we have to be very intentional and purposeful about what we are going to add to the mix.”
ID SOFTWARE As well as being a bit all over the place and lacking a centre of gravity geographically, there’s an argument to suggest that structurally, outwardly at least, Zordix is similarly lacking focus. Seelye doesn’t agree that the group has an identity problem, however, but rather the issue might be a matter of projection or messaging. “We are actively looking at how we present
ourselves to the world. What message do we want to give the industry? What message we want to give gamers. What message we want to give potential studios that we might acquire of what it means to be part of Zordix. We’re actively working on that
18 | MCV/DEVELOP December 2022
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