Today I am going to be the wrapper on one of those drying agents put inside packs of beef jerky. Please stop reading this article if you dislike being told “do not eat”.
A lot of people got tingly body parts on seeing Netflix’s acquisition of the company that made Oxenfree. I would love to see the week-over-week sales for Oxenfree. I bet it went up noticeably based on game developers running out and buying this game based on the press release. “We made one game and got boughted out by the Netflix” says the press release.
I could actually feel a momentary surge of tears upon reading this press release. I was able to prevent them from pouring down my face like hot rivulets of seawater at low tide. The pangs of grief hit me upon the realization that the percentage of people who make bad studio management decisions is about to go way the fuck up.
I say this from a good place. I mean well. The problem is that the story is more complicated than it appears on the surface, and most people are looking at it on the surface and making decisions to figure out what got Netflix to buy the creators of Oxenfree. Every tired work-for-hire IP creator who dreams of shipping their own game equates themselves, true or false, to this team. They probably feel that they could be next in line if they put on the same fancy attire and sing similar songs to get on the same stage and have the same fantastic outcome.
I say this because I was probably one of those kids once.
So let’s dig a little deeper and drop a stinky poop all over those excited dreams for a few minutes.
Let us start by taking a look at the release date of the game. Netflix made this announcement in Q3 of 2021. Oxenfree was released in Q1 of 2016. That is a long time to be paying people’s salaries on one royalty stream. If you do a little digging on the Googles, you will find a wacky wiki page that talks about work-for-hire deals and partnerships with other companies to pay the bills—one of which almost tanked the company. I am lazier than you in not providing links: dO tHe ReSeArCh!
Assuming you feel like you can keep your company afloat for five years, let’s look at what else makes this company special.
If you read about the creation of Oxenfree, it is a Very Different Game™. Disclaimer: I own a copy via Epic Game Store, but I have not played it so I cannot confirm or deny these claims. It looks like they had some sort of partnership with another company to do some kind of transmedia bullshit. I confess I do not understand it. You probably do not either. We will come back to this.
This game has some unique selling-points on narrative and storytelling. It also has paid voice actors, and a soundtrack from an audio person that has more links to fancy audio references than I have the time to click on. So while the art style matches a lot of random low budget indie games (like yours!!!), they clearly snuck in some high budget items that you might not be able to afford. This added to the game ambience I assume. So while it does not look like a fancy, high-production game, remember that half of the other games out there have their brothers and sisters doing the voice acting for the heroes, and Dad reading out the lines of the villain (too Freudian?). These details matter.
So we have some random media hype that came out of somewhere. We have some fancy sound effects and voice overs. Someone somewhere spent some money on this game. That also means they probably have a good PR person to help orchestrate this and put it together. They have a game that talks about different elements of storytelling but pretty much followed the industry script for talking about that story. I am smirking smugly over here at my own cleverness, and I hope you can look past it because most of us cannot make it past the second article on how to effectively do PR without getting tired and wanting to go sleepy times.
I promise to only make you sadder for a few more paragraphs. I am going to say something positive and nice to try to scrape your feelings off of the floor by the end. Stay with me. You will be okay.
So we have some money for PR. We have some money for paid voice actors. We have some company doing media stuff to bolster the project and we have a Unique Selling Point that earned some industry awards.
Some of you are probably doing work-for-hire and can solve the money problem with your split-focus studio. I have lived this life. Binge on licensed game projects for other companies. Purge on building your own IP. This is the cycle of indie life.
The Unique Selling Point comment appears more than once in this article. It is almost as if it is important. It really is. While many of you have “get my studio acquired” as step three in your plan to jillionairehood, step two should not be “make an Oxenfree clone”. Please cross that off of your 2022 list right now. This game has a Unique Selling Point. If you want to really stand out, please do not attempt to Xerox this product and wonder why the streaming companies trying to slide into the games publishing business are not frantically offering you briefcases of money.
There is one last nugget I am going to drop here. Some of the founders came out of careers at TellTale games. Some of the founders came out of Disney. This is a veteran team with track records that check a bunch of the M&A boxes much like you need to enter your PIN to get 20 dollars from the ATM.
So if you are doing some kind of analysis of this deal, and think you deserve a similar payout, ask yourself some questions:
- Do I have good PR?
- Do I have revenue streams to cover my original game development and five years of not getting acquired?
- Do I have a Unique Selling Point for my game?
- Do I have a track record that gets me into a slide deck by a fancy M&A person?
- Bonus points: Do I have relationships/games/random-whatever to do whatever the hell Skybound Interactive did to augment all the other things above?
This is where I apologize for the hot mess I just made of your dreams.
Now I am going to try to fix it because otherwise I will feel like a shitheel for the next week.
You should pick one or two of these things to work on. Be prepared for it to take years. The more time you can invest up front in solving those problems, the shorter your path to “step three: sell the company” will be, and it will already be a five-year journey if everything is in your favor.
So what is the important thing to fix?
For me, I will argue that pedigree is pretty important. The best way to be a successful indie is to spend three to five years in the salt mines on someone else’s IP. The bigger the better. If you can show the world that you have a track record of dealing with eight- and nine-figure projects, things will go better for you. When I say “the world” here, I do not mean Cathy Customer. I mean Patty PR, Veronica Venture Capitalist and Denise the Designer.
It is worth it to invest five years in career building to help bolster the width and depth of your portfolio opportunities as an indie. We sensationalize the folks like the Popcap founders and Notch, but those are extreme outliers. If you think you are that person, then best wishes to you. I will remind you again that I said “do not eat” at the start of this article. You do you.
The next thing to look at is the Unique Selling Point. When I was looking at career plans in 2016, I was playing a lot of Summoners War. I did some napkin math and looked at their release notes dating back to launch and calculated how much it would be to build a mobile viable MVP to compete in that space. I am not going to depress you with the number. It was large. It would probably be hard to raise given that it is an also-ran opportunity. Some people like to write those checks—they are not in my twitter DMs.
And that is front and center the reason that we are here. Their unique take on dialog and story probably factored heavily in the acquisition. Netflix squeezed out Bandersnatch, and visual interactive stories that resemble 1980s young adult “choose your adventure” products with such similarity in simplicity that it actually merited a lawsuit. I cannot make this stuff up— if I told you to turn to page eighteen.
Netflix wants to have its own flavor of Unique Selling Point for content. As well they should. Their CEO correctly identified Fortnite, and all things like Fortnite, as competitors for his billion- dollar jet-setting lifestyle.
So he is coming to do 1v1 with all the publishers out there.
Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? It is hard to say. It is a nice paycheck if you can get it.
Movies and books spawn their own games. Games spawn their own movies and books. Something something metaverse.
If you think about the problem intelligently, it is a pretty good time to be alive as a game developer. In order to think about the problem intelligently I recommend diving deep into each of these acquisitions and understanding what problems are being solved by them, and what that means they will need next.
If you make a second Oxenfree, Netflix already has one of those and it is very nice.
Try to figure out what someone will write a check for in five years, and be prepared to be a little hungry for some of that time.
If you are trying to figure out what you can sell tomorrow, understand that you are already five years too late.
And that is my story. I hope that last part helps give you some ideas. If you have a friend in the industry who spent the weekend playing Oxenfree, you might want to send them this article. Try to play dumb so they do not hate you forever. Rather, ask them “hey is this guy making any sense?” If you can downplay it successfully, then they can be mad at me for being the person who told them “do not eat”. If they take offense that you are telling them they are doing the wrong thing, then offer them an apology because you were just trying to help.
Will they accept that you are helping them with their Netflix acquisition dreams? I don’t know.
I have certainly seen Stranger Things.
