Does it stack?

As I am putting the final touches on my “Tedious Creativity” product for game masters, I want to talk about one of the dumbest things I have done in my career.

In 2007 or so, mobile 1.0 was starting to wrap up. It was pretty clear that the party was over, and people were either leaving on their own or being not-so-gently escorted to the exit.

My business partner and I decided to shutter our fledgling studio before this happened and each of us went our separate ways.

I sat down and tried to figure out my next steps. There were two marketplaces that were adjacent to mobile games. The shitty, casual, downloadable games market, and the shitty Flash games market. I spent about a month in analysis paralysis on which of these two markets made the most sense for me to spend time and energy on.

The mistake I made here was meme-worthy. I was the “why not both?” kid. And that was absolutely the dumbest thing to do.

I had two sets of contractors working on projects. One was a tribute to “The Oregon Trail”. A downloadable casual game where you travelled west across a pseudo-random map including a mountain range, some rivers, and eventually settled in the west. It generated a fun little narrative outcome based on how many wagons, resources, and people you arrived with. It had some interesting progression structures and the ability to choose multiple different wagon masters to help give different outcomes.

The other project was a limited Flash game that told the first leg of a three-part story. It was the story of a young farm boy on his way to learn how to become a wizard. The game was a simple puzzle game where you matched items on a board for simple offensive and defensive spells in battle. There was deliberately no progression added to the game.

The good news and the bad news is that both titles shipped and recouped their investment. This was good news because I did not lose my shirt. This was also bad news because they did not generate profit.

While I learned a great deal about each platform, it was not enough for me to make a decision to commit to one or the other, and in the intervening window of time it took to ship both of these products, each marketplace was maturing, and going the way of mobile 1.0. They were both collapsing and were soon to be gone.

The mistake I made was to split my focus between these two different marketplaces. There was almost nothing that could be leveraged from each project into the other. They each had different audiences—they each had different technology stacks. It was a fun design exercise and I learned a tremendous amount from each product.

I have done some analysis on game designers and game studios over the years. I always ask people if they can name ten different designers who have had “best sellers” in two or more categories.

It is a very small list. You can count David Jaffe, Jon Van Caneghem, and Will Wright among them for certain. The list breaks down at that point and you really have to squint at the other game designers and their products and nitpick. I do not know that I have ever seen that list get to ten designers.

It is probably tremendous hubris on my part to think that I could have gotten two “base hits” in two different categories concurrently. Even in early mobile two of the products I worked on were top five best sellers in the same category.

I am spending some time thinking about this right now because I am about to launch a product and thinking about what to do next. I have decided to reopen my back catalog and picked a game to iterate on. I chose one of the first two games I have ever made—a simple RPG I built for the Pocket PC—to be the basis for my next project.

There are a few reasons for this.

The first is that it is the product I want to make.

The second is that it is time to stack up my projects more effectively.

If you look at games like Diablo, Torchlight, Fate, and others, you will find out that there is a core of individuals who, working together, have honed their craft in this space. All of them went on to make a successful game in its category and in its genre after they initially worked together on one project or another. Sometimes it was at Blizzard—sometimes it was at WildTangent.

The core team that did Diablo went on to make a studio called Flagship and worked on a game called Hellgate London.

As a customer, I was super excited to hear that the Diablo team was making a new game. The instant I saw the trailers I felt like I was pushed off a cliff.

It was nothing like Diablo. I immediately became unexcited.

I think there is a decent-sized segment of gamers who felt the same way. The game launched and did not attract a massive audience.

It is my personal opinion that this product would have done much better if they stuck to their core expertise—they should have stacked up their projects.

You can look at Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, and many other game designers who have built their careers on a stack of games. It is a good model to follow.

Quite often, if you peer into the history of a particular game studio, you will find the same thing. Studios develop expertise around a particular genre or audience. They will find repeated successes with that genre or audience.

You will also find that many of them have early projects that did not do well or were cancelled. In some cases they used these projects to build a core audience or a core technology upon which they could grow.

Starting businesses is hard. Getting successful with consumer products is harder. Making a profitable game studio is probably one of the hardest intersections of those two statements.

I have had a few people over the years inquire about some elements of my back catalog that were successful. I always give them the same reply. 

“I will partner with you to do the game you want, but it will need to be the third game we do together”.

While this might be the best long term win-win outcome, generally it is not met with enthusiasm. There is a long and complicated discussion there about leverage, ownership, and strategy that will need to wait for another day.

I hope you all take away the importance of stacking up your projects and figuring out how to leverage them better using my counter-example. While I have learned an amazing amount from the various projects I have worked on, none of them gave me any of that famous “one plus one equals three” magic that you need to succeed in the business world.

Looking forward to lamenting about some other stupid crap I should have done differently next week!