EC Fund Update - Indie Game Publishing - Extra Credits

Before we begin, I'd like to welcome back our bestest buddy Erin Siegel, who knowing full well how much work is involved in making one of these episodes keep saying yes every time we ask for her help. Always a pleasure you brave brave soul. So about 8 months ago 8 months, really? Wow. All right, so about 8 months ago we announced that we were going to start an indie publisher with the funds we'd raised on Rocket Hub in order to test our theory that the publisher developer relationship could be more equitable and still keep a publisher in business. So today we thought we'd talk about how that's been going. First let me tell you turns out it's a lot easier to say, "Hey, why don't we start a publisher?" than it is to actually make that happen. Some of you have probably been wondering why we haven't had much to report so far. That is why. For most of the last 8 months we've been wading through all the legal work to get this thing set up properly. It normally wouldn't take that long, but when you got to juggle it alongside day jobs and a weekly show and well, you can imagine. But we've pretty much gotten to the end of that stage at least for right

now. So yay, we're publishers. Almost. Kind of. Now we come to the next big challenge, finding the right game to publish. One might think that this would be an easier task, but in our opinion one of the main reasons that publishers fail is because they green-light the wrong project. I mean, all of you can probably think of a few games that made you go, "What were they thinking?" when you saw them. Games that probably cost them tens of millions of dollars when even as a consumer with no industry experience you could see it was a terrible idea. In our opinion, this is because publishers often look at the wrong things. Very often they'll look at what types of games have been popular recently rather than why those games were popular. We saw it with MMOs when everybody hopped on the WoW bandwagon without delivering the same level of polish. We've seen it with first-person shooters. Heck, we even saw it with third-person action games after God of War happened. The games that make billions of dollars in these genres made billions of dollars not because they were part of a specific genre, but because they had something special to them. That is what a publisher should be looking for, not just the right buzzwords. On the other side, publishers also often place a lot of emphasis on the viability of the team. Making a video game is an incredibly complex thing, and in the end more game projects

fail than succeed. So, there is a great deal of emphasis put on whether the team proposing a project looks like it's actually capable of getting that project out the door. Now, that is a completely reasonable thing for a publisher to do, and we intend to do a bit of it ourselves. But, our ultimate goal is to see if there's any way we can break the cycle of only funding people with a few major projects under their belt. To that end, we plan to move very slowly and carefully. Like I said before, we want to start this thing off right. While we are 100% behind what Kickstarter has done for game funding, and even spent an entire episode saying how great it is that this new model exists, in some ways I'm a bit amazed at how cavalierly people seem to be taking it. As wonderful as crowdfunding is, the harsh reality exists that many of the projects people have funded may never actually get released. When it comes to game development, a lot can go wrong. So, we want to be smart about this. We are determined to find the right fit for our first few projects. We don't want to waste any of the money you guys put in. And if it takes a few years to find the right game, then so be it. I'm not saying it's likely to take anywhere near that long. I'm just trying to stress how seriously we're taking this. This is also why we've only done a single Rocket

Hub thing for it so far. Many of you have asked if we plan to run another one sometime, and the answer is maybe, but only once we're confident that things are off to a strong start. At this point, we have roughly $50,000 from the Rocket Hub money, plus another few thousand we put in. In the world of game publishing, that's practically nothing. But, I think it's enough to get one or two small projects off the ground. Right now, we're primarily looking at games which could be released for 20 to 30,000 dollars. This probably means platformers, top-down shooters, and maybe turn-based strategy games. It could be anything, but we're only looking at projects that are convincingly viable on such a small budget. So, how do we choose what games to look at? Well, we've been debating that one for a while. Right now, we don't have the scheduling bandwidth to assess every game that might come through the door if we were to do open submissions, much less the ability to scrutinize every team that approaches us with a solid game idea. So, for right now, we're keeping things limited to projects that we see at conventions, or whose teams talk to us directly, either by knowing us through work or catching up with us at a trade show or something. As for the minimum bar for consideration, at this point we're keeping the rule pretty simple. No demo, no discussion. I know that may sound

pretty limiting, but in our time in this industry we've seen a hundred ideas that looked good on paper amount to nothing, and we've met thousands of people with an idea that they'd really love to turn into a game. We need to see that people have the commitment it takes to really make a game, and we need to get our hands on the game and understand how it plays before we even consider spending the money you guys put in to fund it. We'll try to keep you guys up to speed through our website and Facebook feeds and Twitter accounts and such every time we have news or updates. And we may even do an episode like this every, I don't know, six months or something, just so we can keep everybody in the loop. If these first couple of projects go well, hopefully we can open it up and maybe even start doing a broader submission process. I have no idea where we'll find time for a process like that, but we'll work on that problem when we get there. So that's where we are. Thanks again to everybody who made this happen. I know a lot of you guys are eager to see this thing finally start moving for real, and trust me, so are we. Thank you once again Aaron for your heroism, and we'll see you guys next week.