What We Do

Core Talent Games does project-based game financing and development.

• We attract and cultivate the best game design talent.
• By attracting the best game design talent, we make the best games.
• We do deals directly with core talent individuals—you don’t need to be a company to get your project funded!
• We support talent through early creative development—we work at your pace in a low overhead environment.
• We promote the names of the core talent who make games with us.
• We reward the core talent of games with a direct cut of the financial pie.
• We provide investors a strategic approach to investing in video games; one that combines diversified risk with a model to attract and cultivate the best game design talent.

Core Talent Games looks for new designs directly from talent at a very early creative stage. It funds low-cost, low-pressure early design and prototyping. It “packages” new designs with key lead talent to advance projects one step at a time and offers a simple, transparent and substantial compensation deal directly to core team members. It does not hold its key talent as employees to control but views them, instead, as free agents to cultivate and promote. It thus brings in the best talent, markets it and its output, and sells its products. The end result is the best games and the best payoff.

The game industry is, fundamentally, a hit-based entertainment industry. Yet in today’s conventional game industry, creators work within an operations-based model; a practice borrowed from business software development. There are fundamental problems with this system, not the least is that it leads to regurgitated game designs, and tremendous dissatisfaction among key talent. We believe this presents a business opportunity—the rationale behind Core Talent Games.

Game designers have traditionally been held as employees of game companies. These companies become “typecast” to specific game titles and game types (a normal outcome in operations-based business). If these properties are successful, the payoff for designers travels through a long, complex value chain that rarely translates into direct financial compensation, career flexibility, or greater creative control. To get these things designers are thus faced with two choices:

1. Stay confined within the narrow boundaries of the companies that employ them; or,
2. Jump ship, start their own game development studio, but then become saddled with expanding administrative work and complexity when they should be focusing on their creative work.

In the former case, game development companies occasionally ask their employees to pitch new game concepts, but talented designers hold their best ideas close to their hearts, knowing full well they will forfeit rights to their employer and have little chance of compensation if the game is a success. Designers know that having a brilliant new game design should do more than guarantee employment.

This leads to the latter case: their only chance to pursue their dream game ideas, and get fair compensation, is to leave their company and form an entirely new one. However, now they must devote more and more time away from their design work on to building and managing a company. This usually inevitably means working on sequels and so forth, thus reinforcing their own creative typecasting, and losing sight of why they became game designers to begin with.

Thus the cycle is repeated, and the game industry sinks into a morass of self-repetition and unoriginal work.

Core Talent Games overhauls this. It simply cuts an entirely new deal for game design talent: a project-based one, similar to that used in the film industry but tailor-made for game development. It deals directly with the top-level core talent as small teams and individuals. This frees core talent to control its own destiny and, more importantly, to expand its vision and follow its creativity beyond the narrow confines of a parent game company’s next-season portfolio requirement.

In short, Core Talent Games says to designers, “We know you are holding your best ideas close to your heart. We want those designs. And we’re willing to cut a clean and generous deal directly with you to get them.” By doing this it attracts the best talent, the best designs and makes the best new games.