Viridian Games

Ensemble Studios is one of the few companies that if they called me up, I’d go work for them sight unseen, just based on the games they’ve made so far.

And now they are closing.

And they aren’t closing because they aren’t successful. The Age series of real-time strategy games has sold over twenty million copies so far. They are currently working on Halo Wars and it looks like it’ll be a damn fine RTS.

They’re closing because they inhabit a space Microsoft doesn’t care about any more: the PC. Even though Halo Wars will ship on the 360, Microsoft doesn’t consider Ensemble a console developer, like Lionhead or Rare. Another problems is that Ensemble is huge now - over three hundred employees. Microsoft just doesn’t want to pay upkeep on such a large PC studio no matter how many copies future Ensemble games sell; it’s just not part of Microsoft’s strategy.

The result is that Tony Goodman, who was one of the founders of Ensemble, has already founded a new company and sent out invites to some of the current Ensemble employees to join it as soon as Halo Wars ships. We don’t know the new company’s name yet; right now it’s just being called “Newco”. Other people not invited to join Newco may be able to get jobs at other studios in the Microsoft Games family, but I’m sure there will be some people to whom neither are these offers are extended and, well, it sucks to be them.

Now, Newco’s first game will almost certainly be for the PC, and it’ll almost certainly be published by Microsoft. But Microsoft won’t be paying the light bill or the gravity bill at Newco and thus will be insulated from its possible failure. But this is the type of thing you do to a studio that has lost you money, not made you money. Unless there’s something in Ensemble’s financials that I don’t know about, it seems that Microsoft is throwing away money just so they can “consolidate their business plan”. I can’t help but wonder if they would do the same thing if the company involved were Blizzard.

Well, rest in peace, Ensemble. Once I purchase Halo Wars I’ll have bought every single game you ever produced.

So the eternal war between “casual” and “hardcore” rages on, with Spore as its current battleground. Actually, I should amend that statement: the hardcore continues its war against the casuals, while most of the casuals don’t even know the hardcore exists.

I was really surprised at the low scores I was seeing for Spore before release. They made me kind of nervous…had Will finally dropped the ball?

But of course I did not allow them to deter me from purchasing the game myself (Galactic Edition, of course).

In the end, reviewers are hardcore. Most of the reviewers who played the game dinged it for its ease and lack of depth. I guess they were expecting the Tribe stage to be as deep as Rise of Nations and the World stage to be as deep as Civ IV and the Space stage to be as deep as Galactic Civilizations II. The problem is that Will wants people to be able to progress through each stage to the next one without too much trouble. He doesn’t want people to get to a stage and realize that they either just don’t like it or can’t do it. Because he knows that’s a shelf-level event. Thus each stage (up to Space) is designed to be an interesting experience, but not a particularly challenging game. This is very, very “casual” thinking.

And then, as if to clear up any doubt as to what kind of game Spore is, Will gave an interview to MTV’s Multiplayer Blog, where he said, “We were very focused, if anything, on making a game for more casual players. ‘Spore’ has more depth than, let’s say, ‘The Sims’ did. But we looked at the Metacritic scores for ‘Sims 2′, which was around 90, and something like ‘Half-Life’, which was 97, and we decided — quite a while back — that we would rather have the Metacritic and sales of ‘Sims 2′ than the Metacritic and sales of ‘Half-Life.’”

A lot of people have taken this as a ding against Valve, but it’s not really. Half-Life 2 was a very successful game. Very successful. And it sold about one-tenth as many copies as The Sims 2 and its expansion packs.

Wright has figured out that he can both make great games and make a metric asston of money simply by appealing to a wider audience. This was obvious with The Sims, but was far less so during the development of Spore. The high-pitched whine you are hearing is the “hardcore” faction realizing that a game they assumed would be “for them” isn’t.

Will Wright has created the ultimate casual game.

That costs $50 and requires a pretty hot computer to play.

It’s this schizophrenia that is driving everybody crazy.

(So how do I like it? Well, being firmly mid-core, I am thoroughly enjoying it. I’m currently at the Tribal stage. I can’t wait to get to World stage and see how Will has simplified Civilization. Of course, the game still has plenty of time to kick me in the Mean Bean Machine, but I kind of doubt that it will.)

Um…well, not me. The game I worked on here at Aspyr, futureU, was given a very quick mention this morning on NBC’s Today Show! If you want to see it, go here and fast-forward to about 4:30 into the segment. Squee! Of course, I worked on the PC version, not the DS.

Update: Holy crap!

Okay, now look at that list. Spore doesn’t actually come out until Sunday and both Warhammer Online and Wrath of the Lich King are months away. So futureU is currently the highest-selling game on Amazon that actually exists.

So two froody dudes, Dan “Gibbage” Marshall and Ben Ward, decide to stop piddling about with their own pathetic projects and team up, creating Zombie Cow Studios in the process.

And to celebrate, they decided to give away a game for free - an adventure game called Ben There, Dan That!, which stars…um, them. That’s right, you control Ben and Dan as they bumble through a loving homage to the classic Lucasarts Adventure games, doing things like smacking priests with bibles, visiting alternate dimensions, and…um…climbing out of a cow’s rear end. Hey, they’re British.

Now, even given the fact that they used Adventure Game Studio to create the game, that’s a heck of a lot of work to just give away. But I heartily, heartily approve of the process, and not just because I’m cheap. I think it’s the right thing to do because it helps them grow their community, and I believe that community is the solution to all of gaming’s problems.

Does your game stink? Get people interested in the potential your game might have and they can help you fix it. And you don’t have to do it all before you ship. Feedback after you ship is just as vital - but those lines of communication must be open.

Are you having trouble marketing your game? Again, community can help. Bungie’s testers sang the praises of Myth: The Fallen Lords to all their friends once their NDAs were lifted, which helped Bungie as they took their first steps into the PC market.

Are you having trouble keeping people interested in your game? Once again, community to the rescue. The most popular online first-person shooter in the world is still Counter-Strike, which kept copies of the original Half-Life on store shelves for years. The incredible response of the Korean community means that you can still walk into a Wal-Mart and buy a copy of StarCraft - a game that was released in 1998! Caravel Games goes even farther with their Deadly Rooms of Death series. The DRoD games consist of a layout of rooms, each containing a puzzle. The DRoD website gives you an overall map of the game - and clicking any room on the map takes you to a forum thread discussing that room. It’s an excellent way to provide player-based support, in addition to player-created content.

Are you having trouble funding your game? Yes, this is the iffiest one, but it’s been done. Lots of people have started by creating a small, well-supported game and then rolling the profits from that into something much larger. I think my favorite story of this nature is that of Jeff Minter, who was saved from having to get a real job by the incredible response to Llamatron, which Minter released for free along with a README.TXT file that included this paragraph:

Here’s the deal. You play Llamatron and check out the hook. If it gets you (and I reckon it will if you like mayhem), then send us a fiver and, as a reward for being so honest, we will send you an ace poster of our gun-toting llama, a newsletter, and a complete copy of Andes Attack, originally released in 1988 to considerable critical acclaim. Two games for a fiver - can’t be bad. And if the response is good, there will be more Shareware. And better.

And of course there’s also the aforementioned Dan Marshall, who is currently in the process of giving away two hundred pounds to an indie developer chosen by his readers.

This is the kind of thing Jeff Vogel is talking about when he says, “Shareware is a force for good.”

And finally, the big one.

Are you having trouble with people pirating your game?

Well, of course you are. People pirate stuff. They’re going to do it. You can’t do much about it.

If you want to come to terms with piracy, you need to come to understand that you’re not trying to eliminate it. You’re trying to reduce its impact to the point where you can still make the money you need to make on your game to stay in business. I wish I could tell you to just ignore piracy but I can’t - you should be going onto those download sites and demanding that they remove your game, because you do want pirating your game to be more complicated than just doing a Google search.

How can community help here?

Well, it’s harder to steal from somebody when you feel like you know them personally. It’s also harder to steal from somebody when they are trying to be the good guys.

The seminal example of using community to beat piracy is Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2. Absolutely no anti-piracy stuff on the disc. No CD key. No CD check. No phoning home. No refusing to run if there’s a compiler on the same system. No installing low-level drivers that monitor all data traffic without the user’s knowledge. Nothing. The only thing it uses is a unique account key that allows you to create a support account on Stardock’s digital distribution network, so that you can redownload the game if you lose your discs.

And yet it sold a bazillion copies and was a huge moneymaker for Stardock. And as I’ve mentioned before, one of those copies was sold to me. Even though I’ll never have time to play such an involved game. Why did I buy it? Because they were doing it right.

I have said that game design is a conversation between the developer and the player. But now I’ve come to realize that the metagame of game development is the same thing.

If you want to succeed in game development, don’t just make games. Help people have fun. And that means getting personally involved, with all the risks that carries.

Here’s the first bit of an email I got today:

Hello Anthony,

I hope this email finds you healthy and well *smile*. My name is Elizabeth and I am a Senior Talent Scout at [company name redacted] and I SO need your assistance.

Chuck, I need Senior SW Engineers with Casino Games experience like yesterday!!! This is for a fun, dynamic team in Austin, Texas responsible for the development and documentation of casino game software.”

Yeah, uh, you missed a search-and-replace at the beginning of that second paragraph, Elizabeth. It kind of spoils your attempt to suggest that this is a personal email directed solely at me.

Tim Schafer cannot catch a break in this goddamn industry.

Move on, Tim. Go work for Pixar. Write an animated movie for them and make a hojillion dollars. I know you loving Gaming, but Gaming is currently controlled by her chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother Corporate Game Development and until Gaming finds the courage to sneak out of her mother’s house and jump into your convertible so you can spirit her away, you two are obviously never going to be together.

Edit: I jumped the gun just a bit on this (though reading that headline, can you blame me?) I had actually gone to the Double Fine Action News Site to find out if Brutal Legend was going to be okay. I did not think to mouseover the picture of the weevil, but that’s Schafer for you.

Edit 2: Turns out that Activision did drop Brutal Legend - fortunately, Double Fine owns the IP. So things aren’t quite as rosy as Tim made them out to be. Yes, in theory, with Guitar Hero and Rock Band making squillions of dollars finding a new publisher for Brutal Legend should be a no-brainer, but please see the “chain-smoking crack-addicted abusive alcoholic mother” comment I made above.

I try to keep the PSRD breaches on this site to a minimum, but it’s time. So, here is the warning: I am about to piss you off. If you don’t want to be pissed at me, do not continue reading.

Okay, so science discovers yet again what anybody with a brain cell already knows - that men and women are interested in different subjects and this is the reason why there are so few women in technical fields. This also explains why there are so few women in game development.

This has infuriated me in the past. I got into a rather vituperative conversation about two years ago on Game Girl Advance about why are so few women in game development and why the ones who do enter the field seem to get a lot of attention, especially if they are attractive. (I posted there under the handle BadmanX). A poster in that thread explained patiently that the only reason women aren’t more prevalent in game development is because of sexism.

Hello? Hello? Are you shitting me? (Oh, I’m going to swear in this post too. Just a warning. Megan, stop reading.) Most HR departments are falling all over themselves to hire women! Do you really fucking think that HR directors all over the country are saying to themselves, “Wow, what a fantastic resume…TOO BAD SHE’S A CHICK! Into the round file with her!” Don’t be absurd.

Attempting to appease the Gods of Political Correctness by artificially “evening out” the number of male and female game developers is doomed to failure. It will only hurt the game development industry and companies shouldn’t bother, no matter how much the feminists bitch.

On the other hand…making games tailored for women was and is a fantastic idea. Women arrived to the gaming party a little late, but now they are here and ignoring them is just stupid. People just need to come to grips with the fact that far fewer women are going to be inspired to make their own games than men. And there probably always will be.

Brad Wardell of Stardock has talked a lot on his blog about the development of Sins of a Solar Empire, and how it brought Stardock and Ironclad Games very close together, to the point where they could almost be considered one company. Stardock is technically the publisher but because they also develop games they could provide all kinds of help to Ironclad to get their game ready to go out the door - and the game certainly seems to have benefited, with a Metacritic score of 88.

Now Stardock is teaming up not just with Ironclad but also with Gas Powered Games to produce their new action/strategy/RPG mashup game Demigod.

In a previous video blog of mine I mentioned how Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games teamed up to the benefit of both, and this appears to be More Of The Same, and I couldn’t be happier.

Frankly, I think the two best game publishers on Earth right now are Stardock and Valve. Funny how both are developers as well as publishers. And funny how both use a combination of digital distribution and retail to sell their games.

All right. You guys may be wondering exactly what we’re doing here. Yeah, you know it’s game development, but I wanted to take a minute to lay my personal philosophy out before you.

Game development is a conversation. It is a conversation between us, the developers, and our players. If we continually talk about subjects our players aren’t interested in, it just can’t surprise us if they eventually wander away to talk to somebody else.

I can hear the grumbles already. “Are you saying we should be completely ruled by marketing data? What are we - Electronic Arts?”

No, but I am saying that it will be up to us to express ourselves through our games while still providing games that the market wants…so we can stay in business. Because in the end, we are playing a game too - a real-time simulation-strategy game called “run a successful game development company and maybe get rich doing it”.

So don’t chafe against these restrictions - revel in them! Restrictions breed creativity! Artists like to fantasize about the day they will be so famous and rich that they’ll finally be able to do whatever they want and realize their true vision - even though every time an artist has done so, the results have been disastrous.

In the end, never forget that our job - our goal - is to try to make people happy.

So let’s do it!

Soundly situated in obscurityland
Famous in inverse proportion to how cool I am
And should I ever garner triple-digit fans
You can tell me then there’s someone I ain’t indier than
- MC Frontalot, Indier Than Thou

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the indie gaming scene for a while.

The love, of course, comes from appreciating and identifying with people who can make games in their spare time.

The hate comes from…

Well, it’s complicated.

But it’s basically all Steve Pavlina’s fault.

See, Steve ran Dexterity Software back in The Day(tm). He had forums on his site (like any good small developer who understands that building a community is just as important as making games). Those forums attracted a lot of other people who wanted to follow Steve’s path…thus, they became the unofficial “indie developer” forums.

But then Steve stopped making games and closed the forum down. The indies needed a new forum, so they created one. They named it the Indiegamer Forums.

That was their first mistake.

Why? Because by overtly stating “This board is for indies only” they made it necessary to define what an “indie” is…and there are lots of definitions.

And thus, there has been a lot of heat generated on the board over the years as people do things that “betray the indie code”…as perceived by some of the main posters there. Lots of people have run afoul of this over the years…usually for doing completely prudent things necessary to keep themselves in business.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing good there. That’s not true. But the board has been susceptible to vituperation in the past and that’s why I don’t read it any more, even though I’m allegedly their target audience.

Example? Well, here’s a good one: GameTunnel, the leading indie game review site, recently released their Top 100 Independent Games list. A list like this is always going to be contentious, but there’s one game that absolutely should be on that list and isn’t.

And that game is Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II.

Why isn’t it? Well, this just goes straight back to their “What is an indie?” problem. Stardock is too “big”. They can get retail deals based on the strength of their past games. They have their own Steam-style system for purchasing and downloading games directly over the internet. Their stuff gets reviewed by all the major gaming sites. Thus they aren’t indie. “Indie” to the denizens of the Indiegamer Forums is one guy in his bedroom making whatever he wants (er…as long as he doesn’t dare make a “casual” game).

Of course, that’s exactly how Stardock started. And Stardock has never sold themselves.

They fulfill my requirements for indie - no one can tell them what to make and no one can tell them when to ship.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Stardock is an indie gaming company that has simply made real good.

And now Retro64 has been purchased by PopCap. Retro64 is owned by Mike Boeh, a consummate indie developer and the creator, maintainer and host of…the Indiegamer Forums. Retro64 also hosts Game Tunnel.

PopCap has long been decried on the Indiegamer Forums as a corporatized clone-making machine; a company that cares only about money and simply steals every good game idea they come across. Go ahead, search for “PopCap” and “Zuma” on the forums and see what you get.

Mike has escaped the white-hot backlash his “selling out” would normally have generated on the forums because he’s the host - and frankly, everybody likes him. He’s a great guy. But lots of people are seeing this as yet another “true indie” swallowed up by the machine. And although Mike has made it clear that the forums and Game Tunnel were not part of the acquisition, some are wondering what their future can possibly be if the company hosting them is now owned by a “corporate clone monster”.

Frankly I think it’s all much ado about nothing. PopCap could not possibly gain from shutting down GameTunnel and the Indiegamer Forums; and if they threatened to do so those sites would simply move.

But then that’s the other aspect of “indie” that they embrace…the idea of the renegade programmer, coming up with radical new ideas that The Man(tm) will eventually either have to steal…or destroy. ‘Cause you know, the indie scene is the only place where true innovation can take place.

Please. Sometimes I feel like yelling, “Just shut up and make your games!” Though frankly I should take my own advice.