Last week we attended the Game Connection. We were there to pitch The Path to games publishers to get an idea of the commercial viability of the project from their perspective and to see if we couldn’t find any help with publishing the game to retail (rather than exclusively online).
We had 30 minute meetings with both small and big games publishers and with representatives of the three console makers. Presenting a game like “The Path” to them was a very interesting experience indeed.
The Path is not a typical game. It is made very much from an artistic vision and is very uncompromising in terms of gameplay. In fact, there is hardly any. Simply because we didn’t feel such rule-based interactions helped to express our story. On top of that, it is an intensely sad and dark tale that perverts the player’s motivation to play.
Needless to say that some of the companies we met were freaked out by our demo (or FOBD’d as we started calling it). It was extremely amusing to see managers of these big companies go pale in the face.
But what was even more remarkable, and the reason for this post, was the incredible amount of positive response that we received. Contrary to the popular belief that this industry is conservative and risk-averse, we found many publishers to be quite open to what we were trying to do and willing to help us achieve it. In fact, they almost invariably made the same remark about how refreshing it was to meet designers who create out of artistic motivation. Apparently, these days, it is very common for developers to be mostly interested in sales.
We are not being naive about this. We know very well that the personal enthusiasm of the people that we met on the show, does not automatically translate to a business collaboration. But what has become very clear is that the industry is (getting) ready to publish all sorts of experiences. This is very different from our previous intensive encounters with publishers some 3 years ago. I guess it is the success of casual games, the Wii and the DS, MMOs and web 2.0 as a whole, that has made them see that the “games for gamers” dogma is not the only way to be commercially successful.
Now all they need is more developers who are able to meet this demand.
Thats both interesting and awesome. I wish you filmed some of their responses.
Or can the money vs creativity issue be explained by US versus European developers? EA Partners’ Nick Button-Brown apparently thinks so. It’s really interesting to see the publishers become the ones asking for innovation! That’s a world I want to see: where publishers push developers to explore further and deeper instead of always having to hold back.
It would be nice to play a new game and have a new experience. I suppose thats why I enjoy TEF so much; I log on and I have no idea what I’m going to be doing, or what I’m going to see. That makes me happy. I do enough grinding at work.
I’m very happy to hear that, I think the gaming world is certainly changing alot and it’s nice to play a game (like TEF) which is just relaxing and the player dosn’t have to shoot every single thing that moves. It’s about time more work was put into making games that everyone would enjoy not just the “intense gamers”. Let’s just hope this keeps going eh?
Here’s another, related column by a Dutch journalist, rejoicing in the fact that so many different kinds of people are playing games nowadays. But calling hardcore gamers and games journalists dinosaurs waiting for a meteor to hit them, since they consistently rate these “new games” badly while giving the old school hardcore games high scores. In Dutch.
*gasps* I wanna be FOBD’d too!!!!! XD Can’t wait to see how this venture turns out! I really do hope for The Path to be successful. This is definitely something I’ve been anticipating for a long time.