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Tower Studios' Jon Hare on why knowing your limitations is the most important thing for indie developers

25 years of learning condensed

Tower Studios' Jon Hare on why knowing your limitations is the most important thing for indie developers
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Jon Hare is one of Europe's best known game designers with more than ten international number one games to his name and over 25 years experience in the games industry.

Dear new developer,

Welcome to our industry!

As you know, the new frontiers of digital distribution now offer opportunities which have been largely absent since the demise of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST almost twenty years ago.

Fifteen years of platform owner-controlled consoles and high spec PC games made it very tough for people to project their new IP into the public's consciousness.

But, in the last few years, a plethora of mobile and downloadable platforms, coupled with a renaissance for 2D and low tech games have once again opened the door for smaller development companies to get their own designs to market.

All systems go

We're now three years into this Brave New World. As it happens, it's set against a backdrop of global market collapse, which in my experience is great for genuinely innovative new products and companies, provided the investment required to bring the project to market is not too large.

The reality is that provided your company is controlled by private owners and has the products to compete, you can watch with glee as bigger companies, who are tied into the stock markets or with investors tied into the stock markets, start to make rash decision after rash decision in a bid to protect their investments.

To 99 percent of investors, protecting their investments does not mean continuing to bank roll your latest baby (by baby I mean new original IP), it means cutting their losses, losing staff, canning projects and getting the hell out with as much money intact as possible.

Focus on your edge

Of course, the pressure to focus on less desirable creative projects (such as work for hire) becomes greatly increased as a means of short term survival and the feeling of control can suddenly slip through your fingers. This happens a lot in bigger publishers but is masked by the publishing of endless sequels and conversions of existing hit games, which are valuable and good business and can be creatively satisfying to a point.

However, after a few years, the desire to make another new game becomes pretty intense for most proper game designers.

So my first piece of advice to any small companies would be - stay as independent as you can.

...unless you get offered $500,000,000 for your company, in which case my first advice would be - sell as fast as you can.

Someone to hold your hand

My next issue concerns publishing.

Nowadays anyone can become a publisher. The proof is my company Tower Studios published a game in 2011 - Speedball 2 Evolution - that's been a top 10 hit in the paid charts all over Europe on four formats (iPad, iPhone, Mac and PSN).

Sounds great doesn't it, but I know that I'm no publisher.

Having been in this industry for 27 years, I have worked with enough top publishers - Ocean, Virgin, Microprose, THQ, Renegade, Codemasters, Jagex etc - to know what they do and I know my company is not big enough, or experienced enough, or focused enough to match these companies in all necessary departments.

There is one way that newer, development-centric, small publishers trump the older publishers, though: knowledge of how to use new technology to bring games to market and promote them.

Still, as I travel around the games world, talking to many different developers and publishers, I'm often struck by the arrogance and ignorance of small development companies who can self publish.

Poker face

Back in 1985 when I started out, we signed our first five games with publishers and in doing so gave away the publishing rights of our IP. It took us until 1990 to have the negotiation and licensing nous to secure ownership of our own IP for the first time.

Now, I see history repeating itself. The long recent history of work for hire left most developers clueless when it comes to negotiation, and even more clueless when it comes to protecting and licensing their own IP.

If you have made a great successful iOS game, you should be pushing to get it onto as many formats as possible. The best way to do this is to develop on as many platforms as you can yourself, and then farm out development for formats you don't specialise in to companies you can rely on.

Equally, self-publishing isn't really always the best solution, particularly not on all platforms.

Even if you can technically put out a 3DS version of your new game, do you really want to stomp up the money for 100,000 cartridges?

Or do you really want to look at a marketing budget of $60,000+ just to have a hope in hell of being noticed outside of your comfort zone of platforms. No, you do not. This is business beyond your own small notion of what being a publisher is. This time technology is not there to help mask your inadequacies.

Learning from my mistakes

I can hold up my hands and say that honestly I have messed up on Speedball, that we haven't kept it high up in the charts for long enough given its initial success.

That the timing of updates and promotions has exposed my naivety in this new complex network of publishing tricks. I can also say that our marketing strategy failed to hit two of our three target demographics. We hit the old Speedball fans incredibly well, but failed to woo enough younger fans, or enough Americans. However, I can assure you that the licensing arrangement with The Bitmap Brothers and everyone involved with development has been great.

So with our new game Word Explorer, I am weighing up our options.

The game has the ability to hit about nine different mobile and downloadable platforms. It has been designed this way as this is the only way to get real value from an IP - hit as many platforms as you can as cost effectively as possible.

Spread it all around

The division of the market into numerous platforms is a curse for games developers and publishers. Constantly new splintered platforms just means your game will enjoy a shortened shelf life, hitting just a fraction of the available audience.

The solution to this is to design games that are as technology-light and convertible as possible.

Yet, despite the fact we can easily self-publish Word Explorer, I believe the game can be mass market and I am not convinced my little publishing company has the necessary market penetration and power to hit that mass market properly on any platforms.

However, this does not worry me at all. We have good connections with nearly all of the most important publishers, so on the platforms we deem prudent to self publish - if any - we will do so.

On the rest, we will license out publishing rights to bigger publishing companies who can do the job better than we can. If necessary, this can be done on a platform by platform basis.

Honesty in the mirror

My experience over many years has taught me that aside from good creativity and technical skills, the single most important skill that a development company can possess is the ability to license its own IP.

To do this requires good negotiation and legal skills, good relationships with other companies and, of course, good products. It also requires a degree of humility and realism as to the likely extent of your company's own abilities.

Publishing has traditionally always broken down into four basic components.

  • Acquisition and funding of titles
  • Marketing and promotion of titles
  • Sales and distribution of titles
  • Licensing of IP

In general, the first two elements cost money and the second two make money.

I would recommend all companies score themselves out of 10 in these areas. Where the score is less than 6, they'll likely need help in order to achieve better results (companies that are not 100 percent self-owned should deduct 1 from the funding score for every 10 percent of the company that is not owned by active partners, because they have weakened their overall position in order to raise funding).

I would score my own company as follows:

  • Acquisition and funding of titles: 9
  • Marketing and promotion of titles: 5
  • Sales and distribution of titles: 5
  • Licensing of IP: 8

So it is clear that we need help with marketing and sales, without losing a fortune on the million and one marketing and promotional options out there, which is the reason we're considering working with a bigger partner for Word Explorer. As a new IP, Word Explorer will need even more marketing than Speedball, which was a remake of a classic license.

What you do worst

So my final piece of advice, is when, in theory, all of us can do everything, the real question is what do we do best and what do we need help with?

Above all else, this we must ask ourselves the following question. "How do we keep the company going, keep our own IP alive, and still have control of our own destiny, even if everything starts to go wrong?"... which, let's face, is likely to happen this year.

So take a good hard look in the mirror, identify your weaknesses and choose your partners carefully.

Good luck

You can keep up-to-date with Jon via the Tower Studios' website.