This week I want to take you back in time twenty years. It was 2004. I was on my way out from a year of employment at Digital Chocolate and getting back to running a game studio with a business partner and friend, Tom Hubina. That company was called Mofactor, and it is the URL where I host this blog and keep some of my “I am too lazy to edit the contact information” online services.
As the business leader for Mofactor, I made many mistakes, most of which were avoidable. There are a few that really puzzled me.
We made huge piles of mobile games, including some that did well. While we dabbled in experimental gameplay and attempted to raise money “because money,” we also funded our mobile studio through work-for-hire projects with multiple publishers.
We were not the most expensive mobile studio, nor were we the cheapest. When we were invariably asked by any publisher, “Can we get this project done any cheaper?” We generally said no. For a year of projects, we developed a rule of thumb:
For every dollar we spent on making work-for-hire content, we charged our partner one dollar for our own IP. On the surface, this sounded like a good plan. Regardless of what we put into the budgets, this seldom worked out. Intermittent delays, publisher change requests, and new handsets (with new handset bugs) all conspired against us. While we started with a 100% margin on our projects, this would get whittled away over time to almost nothing.
You could argue that we should have done a better job fighting this. Early mobile publishing was a strange place, and given the size of the budgets and the scope of the projects, it seldom made sense to do so. There was always a surprise bug in the handset. There was always a good reason to delay a launch. “The Carriers Did It” was our version of pointing at the dog after nasty gas.
We always sought to create some kind of leverage out of every one of these projects. For a small studio, we had a massive collection of phones and an impressive core library of software with workarounds for many handsets. At its peak, we released about twenty builds covering six hundred different handset models. Most of these games were smaller in binary size than the icons for the Apple App Store of today.
After each project, Tom and I would have a long late-night conversation. It was a form of post-mortem, where we looked at all the things that happened during the project and how that would impact what we did next.
There were far too many projects where we had so little profit on the work that we landed in the same place—as a small studio—as we had started, except that it was six months later.
We came up with a pejorative term to describe these projects.
“The only thing we got was older.”
It is a valuable expression that I still use today. There are times in sportsball games when you want to advance the clock, and those make sense. In life and business, that is less desirable. Sometimes, you want to defer decisions to maximize your business’s optionality and, ideally, create some value along the way.
If all you do throughout a project is marginally get closer to the heat death of the universe, you need to ask yourself: “Was this a good use of my time?”
Do not be too hard on yourself when it happens. It will happen. Acknowledging that you “just got older” is an excellent way to frame how you can do it better the next time.
See you next week!
