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General Frequent Questions
Why are you doing this?We're doing this to try to help change the game industry—to help game development and game developers realize their truest creative potential—but in a realistic and profitable way. Right now the game industry is littered with unoriginal tie-in and franchise deals—projects driven by suits, not core talent. Meanwhile, game talent is getting restless. And it's good core talent that makes good game design. Good game design makes good money. We see this disconnect of core talent from the industry suits as an opportunity waiting to be exploited. As the developers push to get more consistent credit for the work they do, it's becoming apparent that the actual game developers—the creative people—are going to become the stars of this industry. It already happened in the film industry, why wouldn't it happen again in game development? We're just positioning ourselves to be the first major brand in on this new trend—to be the tipping point that heralds a stampede of new growth. There is a saying that a poor general plans to fight yesterday's battle tomorrow. Poor entertainment executives do this all the time. That's why they rely on sequels and franchises—because they made a profit "yesterday". But tomorrow they are bland and tired. Decades if not centuries of the arts and entertainment industry has taught us that there is only one thing you can count on to make good work. Talent. We want in on that. The best talent always tries new things. And these new things—whether flying in the face of all conventional wisdom, or just being a little different—turn out amazing! And very profitable. You explain this in so much detail. Why?Because what we are doing is such a fundamental change in the way games are made, so it will be unfamiliar to game developers used to traditional ways. Traditional development evolved from a model first used in a time when games were driven heavily by technology advances and could be made start to finish by small teams, but a model that is outgrowing its usefulness now that technology development is plateauing and full production teams are much larger. To get out of the quandary of bloated development costs and creative stagnancy, many developers talk in an often theoretical manner about making minor adjustments or modifications to the current model. Or they launch new companies that speak with good intentions of having a "renewed focus on innovation" but still are structured with an operations/company focus, not a project/talent one. We believe these initiatives are well-meaning but counter-production—that game development needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a visionary way, but using methods that have worked in other creative industries. We also realize many game developers may have difficulty unlearning old sacred cows, such as that their individual contribution or name is somehow worth less than that of the company they work under, or that a contract to sell IP can't be as valuable and powerful as IP ownership. We are trying to hit the reset button, but that requires us to clearly outline to game developers—the actual creative people—exactly how and why this new way would work. We realize that they are the first line of change, and that if they think about it they will realize that they hold the power. If they want to do it a new way, the industry will fall in line. You say you wish to stimulate innovative new game design. Why then are you trying to do an entirely new type of deal with game design talent? Won't that just stir up problems?There is much talk from talent on stagnant creativity in game development as a whole. In response to this, you will occasionally read on Gamasutra.com or other websites declarations from game industry executives that "from now on" they will focus on innovation. The problem is that they still wish to work within the existing deal-structure. This is tantamount to top-down command—the chief ordering the troops to "be innovative", but not changing any of the fundamental elements that throw up barriers to innovation. Core Talent Games' view is that game designers start from a creative urge to explore a vision within themselves to make new projects called games, but that they soon get ensnared in making and then operating a thing called a game company, and thus the focus eventually shifts away from the games themselves onto the well-being of the game company. Thus they think they are creating games but in reality they are creating and supporting game companies. In order to keep the game company afloat and pay next month's overhead, developers often abandon the urge to follow their creativity to its lengths and instead start cranking out sequels and so forth, factory style. In other words the games are mere vehicles for the game company. This is hardly a framework to facilitate innovation. Core Talent Games' view is that to help core talent make better games it is necessary to structure a deal from the ground up suited with that in mind. It isn't good enough to say "we are going to be innovative"—one also needs a deal structure that encourages that; which is a vehicle for games, not the other way around. This is what the film industry figured out decades ago—a discovery that transformed film from mere pop entertainment into perhaps the mainstream cultural business of the 20th century. We see that a great deal of talent wishes to be able to get back to pursuing the cutting edge of innovation. We believe we will attract the best game design talent with this new model, we wish to support this talent, and this underpins Core Talent Games' value premise. In traditional game development there are already core teams. You seem to be proposing to make a new core team for every project. That sounds like it won't work?Yes, each game company has a core team. However it's always the same core team. There's no chance to remix the formula—to try new things. The core team frequently becomes indistinguishable from the game company. So if Designer X has a vision to re-invent the WW2 first-person shooter genre, but his game company is typecast to do sports games, he has to shelve that vision. Or if Designer Y has an idea to do a timely game on a current hot topic, but the game company she works for has no interest in it, she also has to shelve that design. Again, the traditional structure values the service of the designer over their actual creativity. We believe that core teams should begin as individual creators following their individual vision, making it into an early design. If we accept this design, we then do a casting process to hand-pick a new core team for that vision. This is done all the time in other industries—film and architecture, for example. We notice you are trying to promote core talent? But game design is a collaborative process. How do you reconcile those things?Core talent and collaboration aren't mutually exclusive. Yes, game design is a collaborative process. However, almost too much "groupthink" occurs whenever development teams become overly large. Since there is an urge to get consensus, unique and daring ideas often become compromised and dumbed-down until no different from yesterday's work. Filmmaking is also a collaborative process. But in film there is room for an individual to shape things before market judgement—for projects to be driven by the vision of an individual director, writer or star. It's just room for an individual voice, not domination or elitism. It can still lead to entertainment. This has enabled film to become both commercially successful and culturally important. We know that in games, whenever you take the team-size down to about two to five people you start to see amazingly innovative games. We saw this in the heyday of computer games, in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, and we see this with very small teams of casual game developers today. So obviously there must be an inherent advantage to reducing the core team to a small size. Core Talent Games seeks to capture this essential quality by putting primary focus on the core creative decision-makers—relying on outsourcing to deal with the heavy lifting of production. We believe this will attract the best talent to us to make the best new games. If you are custom-making teams, how do you know they can work together?This is a valid question. If a team starts work on a project, but soon finds out they can't work together, the whole thing can fall apart. We deal with this in two ways. First, remember that our early design phase is a low-pressure, low-judgement, prototyping period. There are no hard deadlines. Not only does this enable us to see how a design works out it lets us see how a team gets along. Second, the traditional game industry has a passive and somewhat fatalistic approach to team building. Game developers know so much about assets and code but precious little about interpersonal team building. Likewise when a new team goes to a publisher, the publisher looks at the team and wants to see that it gets along—if it does it does; if it doesn't, "nothing can be done about it", and they don't invest. These are inactive ways of "dealing" with team issues. Core Talent Games uses an active approach to team building. There are techniques and expertise, such as team-building retreats and coaching professionals, that can be employed to deal with interpersonal issues, and Core Talent Games will use them. Problems that seem insurmountable can be cleared up with surprising swiftness—or team-mixes that aren't going to work can be identified much earlier. Our focus is to treat game developers like professional adults who can work out these issues in a proactive way. But isn't game development 2.0 already appearing in the form of the core team/outsourcing model?Some companies are beginning to use the core team/outsourcing model that Core Talent Games is building on. However even then core talent individuals are treated as subservient to the company they form together—locked in place, as it were, to this company they must work through. Why? On any film project there is also a core team, but there isn't the feeling that core creators are subservient, or must stay glued together over all projects they make for the next 10 or however many years. In film, core creators are free to move about, to go off by themselves and think up new projects, and to work with different creators as new projects emerge. They too are able to work collaboratively. Why can't that happen in game development? The inescapable conclusion is this: if you can pare a company down to 10 or so employees/partners to form a core company, with the game built via relationships with outsourcers—then what really is stopping you from going all the way down to a model of total creative fluidity? Where any core talent individual is free to move about as they wish, subject to the contracts they make for each project? Again, are you building games or companies? This is what our new model does. There should be nothing—nothing—standing between you and your game design career other than your talent and ability to work. If you want to work with Joe, Bob and Frank on one game, and then leave and work with Jill, Mike and Sam on your next game, you should be able to do that. So we believe Core Talent Games' model is true Game Development 2.0. You can't tell how successful a game will be from a mere "design". Not until you get a working version can you know the game's value.It is true you can never tell the value of something until it is
built. However, the word "vision" implies the ability to imagine
things unbuilt. Any talented architect walks up to an empty stretch
of land and can "see" a finished building there. Indeed the
"profess" prefix of "professional" relates to the classic ability of
an expert to see and declare things before they are made. Even in
martial arts they teach you to visualize your strike breaking the
board if you want to actually break through it in reality. |
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