News Release

Core Talent Games Begins Rebooting The Game Industry

(24 Oct 2008; Toronto, San Francisco)

Today Core Talent Games Ltd (CTG; coretalentgames.com) officially begins business, with head office in Toronto and a field office in San Francisco. Its mission statement “rebooting the business of game design”, CTG plans nothing short of overhauling the way game projects are greenlit. It will do project-based development and financing, a practice familiar to other entertainment sectors but nearly unheard of in the game industry. Structured specifically to attract and promote high quality game designs and design talent, CTG looks to pioneer a new way to initiate game projects; bypassing the current game industry’s stagnant over-reliance on sequels, external tie-ins, control of key creators, and huge factory-style internal production staffs. Headed by three veteran game developers, CTG is built from the ground up to produce fresh new projects in a way that finds and fosters quality new core talent, the ultimate goal being successful games.

The game industry today is where Hollywood was in the 1940s: driven by top-down executive command, with creators heavily controlled by the majors. Core Talent Games redoes this – to become the first “virtual studio/publisher”, reinventing the game industry much as United Artists did the film industry in the 1950s.

CEO and co-founder Tim Carter explains: “While I’ve always been creatively involved in games, I began my formal entertainment career years ago in the film business. A producer optioned a screenplay I wrote, a common film technique to raise financing. The deal we cut meant I would get rewarded for my core creativity if the film did well – I’d get compensated for sequels and so on. But more than this: the deal was with me as an individual creator, and would help build my name.

“Later I entered the game industry and did core design on some projects. But I could never understand why I couldn’t ask for the same terms as a game designer I could easily ask for as a screenwriter. The individual creator kind of deal is almost totally unheard of in the game industry. But that deal is what helped turn the film industry from pop entertainment into THE major cultural artform of the 20th century. And then you can look at influential game designers like Michael John and Jason Rubin who also pose the same questions. If the game industry is basically a creative industry, why is there so little power and payoff for core creators?”

Core Talent Games is thus built to support free agency at the core creative level – engaging designers as very small teams or even individuals, treating designs as properties in a legal sense, attaching name developers to them, viewing designers as performers to be engaged, gathering properties into portfolios for investors to fund, and so on.

Rob Crandall, COO and co-founder, frames CTG’s value premise this way: “With CTG we are trying to bring a profoundly more talent-driven business model to the games making business. The existing model is based on scarcity rather than abundance... [which] leads to a heavy emphasis on producing a relatively few safe and predictable games… The threshold to producing a new game is incredibly high. That model can work for some industries (spreadsheets anyone?) but is wasteful and archaic for an entertainment medium that is driven by constant new waves of creative talent like this one. What we see is an abundance of talent out there that is under-utilized. If we focus on that, and couple it with the ready availability of powerful but inexpensive tools and distribution methods, then we can move to an abundance model instead. Our role becomes that of matchmaker and project organizer dealing directly with a constellation of freelancers and outsourcers in a reputation-based system. We will operate by attracting talent on a project-by-project basis rather than by owning it for life. This is a fundamentally more agile model that we believe is better tuned to the marketplaces of both creative talent and game buyers.”

Since CTG’s model diverges so radically from the traditional game industry, a spirit of boldness underlines it. It is very much a go-for-it venture, and to that end CTG is going after designers as much as investors. By getting core designers to believe what they do is undervalued, CTG believes those people will “vote with their feet”, moving toward CTG and its model. And there are signs that core design talent is getting restless in the confines it currently operates within.

According to Thomas Grové, CCO and another of CTG’s co-founders, “Digital distribution, middleware, developer aspirations, and interest by investors to get in on the record profits currently being observed in the game industry have all converged to a point where CTG's business model is an inevitability. When a need stares you squarely in the face, and you are given an opportunity to meet that need, why not try to make it happen?”

Core Talent Games will be attending the Game:ON Finance Conference in Toronto (http://www.gameonfinance.com/), Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 October.

Interview Contacts:

Toronto:
Tim Carter, CEO
t.carter@coretalentgames.com
416 532 3921

San Francisco:
Thomas Grové, CCO
t.grove@coretalentgames.com
415 425 7168

www.coretalentgames.com

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